Directed By Kris Collins

Starring – Kris Collins, Celina Myers, Jason-Christopher Mayer

The Plot – Paranormal investigators Kris (Collins), Celina (Myers), and their videographer Jay (Mayer) expect the usual scares when they set out on their latest case. But after being mysteriously rerouted to an abandoned house deep in the woods, they find themselves facing a force unlike anything they have encountered before. As the night spirals into chaos, missing crew members and eerie phenomena hint at an ancient, malevolent presence watching their every move.

Rated R for pervasive language, some bloody violent content, and graphic nudity

House on Eden – Official Trailer (2025) Kris Collins, Celina Myers

POSITIVES

While the found footage subgenre has rarely ever captivated me into feeling excited and beneficially intrigued with a film, there are some individualized aspects to “House on Eden” that makes a cut above the rest, in terms of quality, beginning with the technical components, which are quite exceptional towards the film’s eerie presentation. Between a variety of unique cameras utilizing various aspect ratios and colorization (An aspect that I’ve always taken exception to towards other found footage movies), and impeccably absorbing sound design, the production goes out of its way towards immersing audiences in the overwhelmingly vulnerability and plight of its characters in a foreign place, allowing not only the freedom of interpretation to take shape when our minds begin to play tricks on us, but also authenticity in the air of lifted footage from its original source that at the very least makes the found footage gimmick feel believable in this instance. Speaking of authenticity, I found the performances to also elevate the minimized characterization of the screenplay, as a result of the movie casting real life social media influencers instead of actors, which allows us effortlessly to see these characters as real people, instead of a performance. This is the second film in a week to utilize such a concept, but it definitely worked out better here than it did in the abysmal “Skill House”, as this trio of friends at the forefront of the movie’s foundation not only each appraise respectively cunning personalities that make the conversations between them all the more endearing in conveying vital exposition to the audience, but also gives their group dynamic a palpable amount of lived-in chemistry that comes across naturally in their spontaneously erratic conflicts with one another, with Kris Collins taking most of the movie’s heavy lifting emotionally and creatively as the movie’s writer, director, and central protagonist.

NEGATIVES

Unfortunately, that’s where the positives with “House on Eden” ends, as I found this a dully derivative and often times confrontational exploit of a subgenre that feels like a hyperbolic Tik-tocker’s idea of constructing a movie with very little ambition or creativity to its conjuring. Derivative especially towards the godfather of this subgenre, 1998’s “The Blair Witch Project”, in a variety of ways pertaining to three filmmaking friends who get lost in the woods, only to come across a terrifying supernatural entity at a house involving its own abundance of secrets. That’s simply on a structural level, but when you dig deeper the familiarity comes across all the more apparent in the ways it incorporates the abundance of found footage cliches into the movie’s creativity, with nothing in the way of legitimate thrills in anything other than cheap timely jump scares or prolonged silence meant to strike a nerve in its audience, but instead eliciting the more arduously angering variety. The script continuously fails this production at every turn, be it the lack of characterization paid to characters who we’re asked to care and concern for from the word go, or even overarching predictability that stems from a lack of subtlety from randomized transparency that comes out of nowhere with each of them, and while the movie thankfully only clocks in at a brief 75 minutes, the material feels elastically stretched to accommodate such a minimized runtime, leaving the pacing setting into the experience in the worst ways somewhere around the halfway point. Aside from the script, even the aforementioned pleasantries with the presentation leaves more to be desired, especially in the incoherence of the camera work, which is some of the more nauseating that I have ever experienced while watching a found footage movie on the big screen. Some can easily forgive this aspect, as it’s a means to an end of utilizing handheld photography, but there’s nothing in the way these characters capture visuals that makes me think for a second that they have any experience in connecting to an audience with visualization, and between continuously struggling to capture clarity for any semblance of understanding to the interpretation, as well as concretely failing logically to surmise a reason why the camera is left on during moments that don’t even pertain to the crew’s documentary, it’s a tough movie to remain invested towards, especially once the cinematography makes the strangely apparent decision to focus on Collins’ fruitfully hypnotic derriere. Seriously, if you told me that Michael Bay commanded the movie’s cinematography, I would have no choice but to believe you, as Collins butt isn’t just the only perfectly framed visual throughout the movie exploration, but it’s also given more screen time than Jason-Christopher Mayer, a fact made all the more convincing when you so dormant camera placements during the interactions between the group placed intentionally behind Kris, and while I’m still not entirely convinced that this section of the critique doesn’t belong in the positives of my review (Kris is after all a breathtakingly beautiful woman), it makes it difficult not to come right out and laugh at this movie’s otherwise honorable intentions towards frightening an audience, with jolts for days and cakes for weeks that dominate its scintillating visual storytelling. Finally, the most divisive aspect of the movie will undoubtedly be the house itself that serves as the primary setting for a majority of the movie’s minutes, and while there’s something to be said for a quietly abandoned house in the middle of the woods that has seemingly been left untouched from its last occupants, there’s nothing about the design of this place that is even remotely creepy, feeling like a residence of grandparent designs on steroids, instead of this ominously isolated site for possible paranormal activity that the screenplay asks of it. Considering the camera work is already so sloppy and incoherent in articulating detectability in the layout of the house, it forces the dialogue to work overtime towards conveying placement each time they press record to film their documentary, and with little about the design that even remotely alludes towards terrifying activity that took place in its corner tucked bedsheet layout of a cozily nestled bungalow, it just didn’t craft for me the kind of atmospheric uneasiness that the movie so obviously intended, leaving it an uphill climb for my preheated expectations, even with shadows and silence that constantly convey something deeper and darker lurks just beneath the surface of its linoleum kitchen tiling.

OVERALL
“House on Eden” takes the social media hyperbolic approach of promising one of the year’s most gut-wrenching engagements, but can’t competently conjure any semblance of scares or atmospheric uneasiness that persists almost without exception in the cozy quarters. While the ambition of Collins making a film on her own terms is commendable by today’s approach, the movie lacks the kind of frequency in frights or frenzy that can hold an audience’s attention for even 75 minutes, instead feeling like an online urban exploration video stretched to fit feature length, without any unique ideas of its own to stand out in an already crowded subgenre of found footage films by 2015’s standards

My Grade: 3.5 or F