Deep Hatred – Film Review

Cindy returns to her family home after the death of her father to settle some disputes. Seeking comfort, she is joined by her boyfriend and friends. But she soon discovers that the house hides a terrible secret.

Oftentimes when I watch a film that’s only a little over an hour long, it worries me because I recognize that the director will have to seriously impress me with the pacing, characters, and story for it to truly blow me away. There’s only so much you can do in such a short time frame and, more often than not, these kinds of films fail to connect with most people mainly because we, as the viewer, end up feeling as though we didn’t get enough time to fully flesh out the characters and the story.

That’s exactly what happened with Daniela Carvalho and Ale McHaddo‘s Deep Hatred, a mind-numbingly boring horror film that runs at a mere hour and fourteen minutes long, and yet doesn’t introduce horror elements until about the final twenty-five minutes or so. It’s a film that showcases a lot of scenery that could be described as “eerie” and characters talking about things, and that’s basically it.

It seemed to me as though the filmmakers were hugely inspired by The Blair Witch Project and wanted to make a similar kind of film. The imagery feels similar and even the poster screams “Blair Witch,” but Deep Hatred is nowhere near as creepy or thrilling as the film that it was so clearly inspired by. Throughout the entire film, I kept waiting for there to be something that would come along and grab my interest. Maybe the film would eventually go extremely deep into the horror side of things and get frightening during its final act, but that did not happen.

To put things bluntly – the film is horribly unscary. I respect Carvalho and McHaddo for trying their best to make what seemed like a slow-burning build of a horror film, but the only problem is that it built to absolutely nothing. By the time the end credits roll, you will likely feel totally empty and unmoved by the whole thing which is such a shame because horror is usually the genre that gets the most visceral reactions out of people.

The costume department here did some fantastic work and some of the designs for “The Drowned” are really impressive, but just because one part of the production team understood the assignment, I can’t sit here and say that the rest of them did because Deep Hatred feels incredibly thrown together at the last minute. It may be only an hour and fourteen minutes, but I can tell you right now that it felt like a long hour and fourteen minutes.

Deep Hatred is a massively unoriginal and uneventful horror film that, due to a short running time, has no place for character development or story growth.