![]() Young actress Joey King is a veteran of a number of frighteners (“The Conjuring”, “Wish Upon”) but she’s given precious little to play here as Wren. White has done a ton of admirable work on television, but he stumbles badly here, failing to even give distinguishing personalities to the girls. Meanwhile, director Sylvain White hauls out all sorts of fisheye lenses, skip-frame editing techniques, and showy effects to conjure the scares, but it’s technique, not the story, that gets us jumping. The screenplay by David Birke and Victor Surge starts to veer into the outright laughable, becoming over-the-top with jump scares and incessant screaming by the girls. He grows as tall as the trees, he time travels, he grows branches and gyrating tentacles, and his power can melt faces and induce seizures in bystanders. In fact, he’s so underdeveloped that soon the story is throwing any and everything against the wall hoping something sticks. Instead, the filmmakers seem to have opted to try and build a franchise character, but that isn’t easy when the villain has no dialogue, no face, and no real personality. It’s unfortunate that the filmmakers didn’t realize that the better way to go with this material was to do a thriller based upon the true story of the two Waukesha teens who stabbed their friend in the woods and blamed it on the actual “Slender Man” urban legend. The nightmares continue, as do the hallucinations, and the Slender Man starts showing up everywhere with the ubiquity of a Kardashian on social media. Why didn’t he just kill Chloe in the woods? How many forms can he take? And what is he really after? After the Slender Man ensures that Chloe bites the dust, Wren and Hallie fear they’re next, but they still keep everything to themselves. ![]() He’s a resourceful specter, I’ll give him that, but the script doesn’t do a good enough job of giving his actions rhyme or reason. Soon, the Slender Man follows Chloe home, sneaking into her home in the form of a black mist. Do the girls alert the authorities about what happened? No, they do not, and it becomes awfully difficult to invest in the fate of such self-destructive leads. That’s not a wise move, as it almost gets Chloe killed when the Slender Man attacks her, but miraculously, she lives to fight another day. Instead, they strike out on their own, investigating the woods in the middle of the night. Even though it could have been a pedophile or vagrant, the girls cling to the urban legend but don’t tell the authorities or their parents. Katie (Annalise Basso) wanders into the nearby woods, never to be seen again, and it leads her BFFs Wren (Joey King), Hallie (Julia Goldani Telles), and Chloe (Jazz Sinclair) to fear she was absconded by the Slender Man. Then, during a class outing, one of the girls seems to vanish without a trace. With such motifs, the film continues to borrow liberally (steal) from “The Ring”, not to mention “A Nightmare on Elm Street” as well. Quicker than you can say, “Naomi Watts”, the girls are watching a video that far too closely resembles the look and feel of the one from “The Ring.” Soon after, the teens are haunted by its contents, hallucinating during their waking hours and having terrible nightmares while they sleep. The film’s premise isn’t exactly the freshest to start with as four teenaged girls learn about an urban legend known as “Slender Man” by watching an artsy-fartsy video online.
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