Polaroid (2019)

Polaroid arrives as the final production of Dimension Films, a studio that did not so much close as dissolve, and there is a certain grim symmetry in a movie about a cursed camera that photographs people shortly before they die. The premise is elemental. A vintage SX-70 passes through a garage sale, a high school loner named Bird takes some pictures, and the resulting images acquire a shadow that migrates from face to face until everyone in the frame has been folded, snapped, or set on fire. The entity follows the rules of photographic development, sensitive to heat and light, which is the sort of detail that suggests someone in the writers' room once skimmed an article about darkrooms and decided that was sufficient research.

The film is led by a young woman who does the surviving, the researching, and the eventual photo-crushing, and the ensemble around her is notably varied without ever mentioning it. Race and identity go unremarked. Nobody delivers a speech. There is no cause attached to the carnage, no lesson tucked into the third act, no moment where a character pauses the supernatural mayhem to explain how the audience ought to feel about the world. The camera is haunted. The teenagers die. The credits roll. In an era that treats entertainment as a delivery mechanism for instruction, this absence registers as almost archaeological, like finding a rotary phone in a drawer.

The result is a lean and largely inept exercise in jump scares, dismissed by critics with a thoroughness usually reserved for tax fraud, and yet it carries no ideological freight whatsoever. It is not a good film. It is not a film with anything on its mind. Those are two different failures, and only one of them is interesting to catalog. I note the emptiness without admiration and without complaint. Some vintages are simply thin.