2012 / NR

Director: Steve Stone

Writer: Steve Stone

Stars: Dervla Kirwan, Charlotte Riley, Branko Tomovic

 

Let it be known that this movie is not to be confused with The Entity, the "true" story of a woman who is sexually assaulted by a poltergeist. Entity  is far less interesting. Let's begin, shall we?

Entity centers around a small, British TV crew from the fictional show "Darkest Secrets" and their coverage of an event which took place in 1998, when 34 unidentified bodies were found in shallow graves in a remote Siberian forest (never a good sign, btw). There is little to no information surrounding the circumstances of these deaths and the Russian authorities refuse to give any insight. The "Darkest Secrets" crew is made up of two camera/sound guys, a psychic medium, and a local who is acting as their guide. It's one of those "this is our last contact with the crew and they were never heard from again" movies.

It's a pretty vague plot and could lead to either an interesting movie or a total dud. I'm sad to say this movie was definitely the latter for me. They try to build upon the the plot a bit by making vague references to experiments that were conducted on the "special" people who were kept in the weird asylum they eventually come across, but it all seems very labored. We do learn, at some point, that they (the Russians?) kept people who had psychic powers locked up so they could run tests on them. I was very uninterested in the story because the story is very uninteresting.

This movie couldn't be saved by the acting, either. The cast was mostly made up of names I wasn't familiar with - with the exception of Charlotte Riley. I know her due to her fairly recent marriage to Tom Hardy (le sigh). I've actually seen her in a few things and she wasn't half bad so I'm blaming the material. There was also a lot of unnecessary cutting and camera-work that made some of the more "intense" scenes too busy and almost difficult to watch.

TL;DR It wasn't great and actually took a lot for me to resist turning it off.

Would I recommend it? Нет (that's a "no" in Russian)