The Taking of Deborah Logan

I won't say I love the mockumentary format -- it has narrative strengths and weaknesses like all other styles -- but it does resolve my biggest issue with found-footage horror: why the cameras keep rolling when the shit hits the fan. The Taking Of Deborah Logan's format is of a student project, a video thesis for a woman's doctorate on not only the effects of Alzheimer's Disease on the patient, but on the family as well. The group of three people (a student, a hired editor, and a hired camera operator) embed themselves with Sarah and her mom, Deborah, for two months, to explore this. But the disease progresses at an inexplicable rate, odd behavior pops up, and doctors are baffled, which is where the movie turns from a horror-from-reality to the main crux of the movie. It's all very well done. The horror of the disease is shown in multiple ways; through a family friend that just thinks burying your head in the sand is the best way to go, to Sarah being desperate and not entirely prepared to cope with it, to Deborah herself. Mia, the student, doesn't factor in a whole lot, and when she does, she's mostly just focused on making sure to get enough footage for her thesis, which does make her come off a little like a vulture. But her and her crew are more supposed to be windows into the story, and that's excusable. As the story moves along, and it takes a turn towards the supernatural, the movie nails the feeling of it all; the editor bails entirely, too freaked out by what's going on, while Mia refuses to leave because of her thesis, and the cameraman is getting paid. Sarah just wants answers to her mother's bizarre and terrifying condition, and it leads them all down a seriously twisted rabbit hole. It's built well and is engaging. What's not excusable, though, is that the movie's format and its willingness to toss the rules it painstakingly establishes out the window torpedoes all the good will it builds. The mystery behind the supernatural element is defined with very specific rules, and in the final minutes, the movie chucks those rules down a well so it can deliver the ending it wants, not the ending that makes sense. It's frustrating to see a movie immolate its own logic for the sake of a gotcha ending. It makes everything that came before it feel like a lie and a waste of time. But even worse is the format itself. I praised it before, and in a vacuum, it works. But within the context of the movie, Mia is filming a documentary about Alzheimer's Disease for a doctorate thesis, and midway through, it stops being about AD ENTIRELY. No professor in their right mind would accept it as fulfilling the requirements of a doctorate thesis, never mind the fact that there was grant money tied to it. With that massive hole in the entire movie's premise, everything falls apart, and you're left to wonder why the documentary was even assembled when it would never be acceptable for school. Hell, WHO assembled it, since the editor ducked out at the halfway point with a very vocal fuck-you to Mia? All in all, it's a fine movie as long as you don't think about it. But I do think about it, and if you do at all, you'll notice that the premise betrays the purpose, and the ending demands you to forget the rules it has established. There's only so far I'm willing to let a movie slide on errors and logic holes, and when they go so far as Taking does, anything positive the movie does gets taken down a notch. Worth a watch only if you completely turn off your brain. Hooptober 2022 movie #18/31