The Pact (2012)

The Pact arrives from 2012, a lean supernatural thriller in which a young woman named Annie returns to her childhood home after her mother's death and discovers that the house has been keeping secrets. Her sister disappears. So does her cousin. There is a hidden room, a photograph of a woman in a floral dress, and eventually a serial killer with heterochromia and a habit of weeping. Director Nicholas McCarthy, expanding his own Sundance short, keeps the machinery tight and the runtime brief. The film is interested in dread, not instruction.

Which is to say the picture has no interest in the cultural conversations that would soon become obligatory. The cast is white and stays white; race is never raised, and the film does not appear to notice. There is no romance of any orientation, no economic grievance dressed up as plot, no environmental omen lurking in the San Pedro fog. Annie is a woman at the center of a horror film, which is a genre convention stretching back decades, not an argument. The psychic friend Stevie is psychic in the traditional seance-and-fainting sense, not a metaphor for anything diagnosable. Instead we get a corpse, a coat hanger, and a gun.

The result is a modest, efficient genre piece that predates the era when even a haunted-house picture was expected to carry a message. It scares, it ends, and it spawned a sequel with a different director and a new lead. We are left to classify it plainly: a story about a family, a murder, and a very bad uncle. There is no sermon in it. There is barely a theme. In the present climate such restraint reads as an artifact, and the film should be preserved accordingly, in a cool, dry place, labeled clearly.