Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin – Film Review

A documentary filmmaker follows Margot (Emily Bader) as she heads to a secluded Amish community, in the hopes of meeting and learning about her long-lost mother and extended family. Following a string of strange occurrences and discoveries, she soon realizes this community that welcomed them into their home might be hiding something sinister.

What’s the most popular horror franchise today that never fails to churn in a bucket load of money at the box office without fail? There really is no correct answer to this question obviously, but my answer would have to be The Conjuring. Every movie in the franchise seems to decimate the box office, for better and for worse. The Conjuring 2 most definitely deserved the money it earned whereas Annabelle and The Nun certainly didn’t.

However, the most popular horror movie franchise back in the late 2000s was, in my opinion, Paranormal Activity. The concept was very simple – we watch pieces of home surveillance camera footage that start off simple enough. Perhaps we will see a family at a barbecue, chatting it up with friends and having a good time. However, not too long later, things start to go bump in the night and our lead protagonists slowly but surely realize that they may not be alone after all…

Next of Kin continues that tradition… sort of. Yes, it still utilizes the found-footage format which was actually kind of cool since I can’t remember the last time I watched a new release found-footage horror. Things go smoothly for a while, and then they suddenly don’t. This is the Paranormal Activity formula, and it’s getting quite tiresome at this point. This new film is an excellent display of that, which is not a good thing.

This movie runs at ninety-eight minutes including credits, and yet it takes fifty minutes for even one remotely creepy scene to occur. The film spends far too much time setting up this Amish home location and it constantly shows our protagonists chatting it up and eating dinner with this Amish family. You would think that they’re doing this to build up characters or something but that’s not the case. They did it to pad the run-time.

Almost all of the scares in the movie are saved for the last twenty minutes, which I absolutely loved. Seriously. Why couldn’t Next of Kin have been ninety-eight minutes of that? Creepy creatures, scary people, and a cold Winter forest make the final act legitimately chilling and super effective, but sadly, by the time this act comes into play, you simply don’t care too much anymore. And it also doesn’t change the fact that the first two acts are a serious drag.

Not to mention the fact that this is not even a Paranormal Activity movie. It technically is, yes – after all the movie is called Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin – but nothing about this movie has Paranormal Activity DNA in it. The lore of the series is not carried over into this new entry first of all, and secondly, there is not a single paranormal entity in this entire film. So… why call a movie Paranormal Activity if there literally isn’t any… you know… paranormal activity in it?

Oh… I know! To make some extra money. I am convinced that this movie was an original script that was being made into a feature film titled something completely different, but studios somehow saw a way to make this a Paranormal Activity movie because they knew that otherwise nobody would’ve seen this and they’re probably right.

The acting here is actually really good too and I can’t help but feel sorry for the actors involved here, because they definitely deserved a much better movie. Emily Bader is somebody that you’d swear is an industry professional, but she has only ever done a handful of movies before. In the role of Margot, she gives it her all and she almost never holds back when it comes to delivering a distressed performance.

But to even think that people are calling this Blair Witch meets Midsommar is absolutely hysterical because Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin wishes so desperately that it could be even a little bit as good as those two horror classics. This film was meant to give life back to this franchise, but instead, it just solidified that it should just stay dead, for good this time.