Let me first off acknowledge that I fall for the shaky-cam technique the same way Charlie Brown falls for Lucy holding the football; it gets me every time. So when I saw the trailer for The River, a TV series done in that format by the director of the most successful movie using the technique, Oren Peli from Paranormal Activity fame, I knew I was probably going to like it. Is it bias? Yep. Should you run and tell the critic police? Of course. I'm ready for 'em! That being said, let's discuss.
So, you find out Dr. Emmett Cole (Bruce Greenwood) is the spearhead of a nature show, where he brings his family along in search of wonders and magic. His catchphrase is "there's magic out there." Think Steve Irwin without the accent. After his small son grows up, the family drifts apart, until Dr. Cole leaves for a secluded area of the Amazon and is never heard from again. After 6 months, his beacon is triggered, leading Dr. Cole's wife, Tess (Leslie Hope) and his now grown son Lincoln (Joe Anderson) and a camera crew to race out there and save him. Simple enough, right?
Now, from that, you would assume the whole series would be about finding the beacon, and the father, but the show does a slight zig-zag. They find the beacon pretty early on, along with Dr. Cole's boat, and a whole bunch of archive footage, but they also find something else, which is the focus of the episode. It's this zig-zag that will be the running part of the show, with the finding of the good doctor being the overall story-arc.
The second episode goes even further, when they find a possible path the possibly late-explorer took, they find something incredibly terrifying that won't let them leave until it gets what it wants, and what it wants is for someone to die. Pretty serious stuff, and it has little to do with the search for their father, rather more about survival. We also get a bizarre possible hint the doctor is still alive through an almost demonic possession of the mechanics daughter, leading us to believe he's out there, but the search is going to be rough.
The episode used the guerrilla-filmmaking style, or shaky cam well, without over-doing it. Some of the scenes were purposefully degraded to make it look more authentic, but it actually just made it look silly. You don't get a lot about the characters in the first two episodes, with the exception of the son and wife, with snippets of old footage to help you along.
That being said, I found it incredibly eerie, and successful in using the same formula that made Paranormal Activity such a hit, that less is more, and this show does it perfectly. Each episode was an hour-long horror movie that opens, scares and closes nicely.
Overall, it's set for a season pass on my DVR, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens next. There's some things I would like to see happen, and I don't know how it will happen in 7 episodes, but I can't wait to find out. There is magic out there, and I think The River could be it.
What did you think?
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