Filmed for a measly $7000 on two iPhones, Threshold’s budgetary frugality and dependence on improvisation (it has no actual script) in some ways should have set it up to be Gen Z’s Blair Witch Project, giving the viewer at least ten minutes of chills on the cheap (just not raking in $250 mil at the box office).
The good thing about Threshold is that it gives young filmmakers hope in that if they have a good enough phone, they can be hip directors and cinematographers—and in the process cut out scriptwriting fees altogether.
This all sounds romantic, but does Threshold really deliver, even at such a low budget level? Yes and no. In what seems to be part of a recent reinterest in possession and occult themes, the film’s narrow focus is on the earnest Samaritan Leo (Joey Millin) who finds out his long-lost sister Virginia (Madison West) has been addicted to drugs and joined some sort of cultish rehab group where she lost her addiction to drugs but was the victim of some sort of bizarre spirit possession by a prominent member of the cult.
Now to help have his sister’s soul, Leo agrees to go on a cross-country excursion with her to try and seek out this darkly mysterious stranger to try and break the spiritual thread that seems to bind the two together. Without many ideas of what they’ll actually do when they find this evil enigmatic character, the closer they get to Virginia’s antagonist, the more severe the possession seems to get, which doesn’t bode well for brother and sister bonding down their highway to hell.
Although in terms of drama and suspense, Threshold doesn’t quite punch above its weight in the way Blair Witch did, it still musters up a legitimately chilling climax—even if the run-up to the said climax is not nearly as consistently gripping as it could have been with the structure and pacing a seasoned scriptwriter could have given it. Still, this is a worthwhile no-budget experiment that should be praised for its at least partially successful minimalist ambitions. Optional.