V/H/S/2 (2013)

V/H/S/2 arrives from 2013, a found footage anthology assembled by five directors and stitched together with a frame narrative about two private investigators and a house full of televisions. The premise is analog nostalgia rendered as a pagan shrine. The tapes must be watched in order, we are told, to affect you. It is a film that wants nothing from us but our discomfort, and it pursues that goal with a single-mindedness that now reads as almost quaint.

The segments include a man with a cybernetic eye who begins seeing the dead, a cyclist who rises as a zombie and retains just enough of himself to end things on his own terms, a documentary crew in Indonesia that infiltrates a cult and witnesses a mass suicide and the birth of a demon, and a lakeside slumber party interrupted by grey aliens. A dog dies at the end. That is the full inventory of the film's concerns. The deaf character in the first segment exists so that a cochlear implant can pick up ghost frequencies, a plot device and nothing more. The Indonesian cast appears because the cult is in Indonesia. Nobody in this production pauses to instruct us on how to feel about any of it. The cruelty is distributed evenly and without a thesis.

We score such a film at the floor across every category, and we do so without disappointment. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no corrective to society tucked inside the gore. It is a nasty, uneven, occasionally inventive piece of work that treats its audience as adults who came for the mayhem. The sommelier sets down the glass and reports, plainly, that it tastes of nothing but blood.