First Born (film): Not horrible but not great

My foray into attempting to find a decent horror film or two on Netflix continues. After failing miserably on The Black Room I went after something completely random that was also on the same list. I should have known better.

While this movie has much better acting than the recently watched and quite terrible The Black Room, the plot is extremely similar in that a young couple ends up being tormented by a demon that is for some reason targeting their young daughter. After the wife, Charlie (Antonia Thomas ) is attacked while home watching the baby alone, they decide to get serious about what has occurred.

It is briefly annoying when her husband, James (Luke Norris ) refuses to believe her side of the story despite the fact that she was obviously assaulted and choked by an invisible entity. I've never really understood this aspect of horror films.

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Anyway, eventually Charlie convinces James to bring in an occultist who specializes in these sorts of things who just happens to be Charlie's father who she hasn't had much contact with in her life.

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He prescribes a number of rituals that must be performed daily in order to keep the demon at bay and for a time, it works. There are a lot of plot holes in these events such as the fact that their daughter, Thea, can not be around certain things which is all fine and dandy inside their home, but she routinely does things like go to school and for some reason or another the demon can not get her there.

This films has it's moments and I really believe that the acting and direction (Nirpal Bhogal) are done quite well. I have no complaints in that department and give them high marks for casting, shot location, realism in stunts, and overall art direction. They lose points on something that I find very important in a film: The movie is boring.

I will probably keep an eye out for the director in the future, but honestly the long stretches of dialogue and talking in circles and senseless attempts at fleeing an enemy that doesn't have boundaries (except schools and daytime outdoors, apparently) all gets a bit annoying after a bit. Also, the story isn't terribly inventive as the whole "unseen ghost-thing attacking when you least expect it" has been seriously overdone. I started looking at Partiko on my phone during parts of it, and to me, that is a good sign that a movie just isn't very good.

On a scale of "Urgh!" to "Wowsers!" I give First Born a rating of......

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