Urban legends, creepypastas, conspiracy theories, and the like can often inspire the most frightening horror films. Do Not Watch is a mockumentary, fount-footage style film that creates it’s own decades-old mystery about three researchers who discovered a strange bunker. The researchers all vanished, but the footage they filmed inside the bunker survived.

Director Justin Janowitz makes his feature-film debut bringing to life the screenplay written by Ryan Toyama, also making his feature-film debut. Do Not Watch pieces together three different timelines; the original bunker footage taken by the researchers in the 80’s, a crew who got their hands on the footage decades later and began working on post-production, and two people trying to uncover the truth of what happened to the post-production team. The filmmakers immediately set up the film with two mysteries: what is on the footage taken by the original researchers and what happened to the post-production team. The audience is only given hints early on, eluding to what might have happened. This allows for the unease to creep in right away, then it develops into tension and suspense as the film gets closer to the truth. There is also an interesting mythos at work in Do Not Watch. It’s detailed enough to understand what is happening on screen, but vague enough that one couldn’t easily poke holes in the film’s logic. At its core, Do Not Watch is a film about the often obsessive quest to answer the unknown despite all the signs screaming a warning.

The performances in Do Not Watch are somewhat mixed, but there are some incredibly strong standouts. Ezekiel Ajeigbe (Outer Banks) stars as the editor on the post-production team, Casey. Casey is a grounding character, being one of the more rational voices while also acting as the bridge between the events of all three timelines. Ajeigbe is great at making Casey the voice of reason throughout the film, helping the audience make sense of the horrors even if Casey himself doesn’t understand. Alix Angelis (The Cleasning Hour, The Magnificent Seven) plays the documentary director. At first, Angelis seems a bit stiff as she films her first interviews in the investigation. When she goes deeper into the mystery, Angelis’s performance really takes off and takes the audience on a journey into her obsession. While in a smaller role, another standout performance comes from Sam Boxleitner (American Horror Story, When Vows Break) as sound editor, David Jenks. Boxleitner at first portrays Jenks as a goofy, fun-loving kind of guy. Later on, Boxleitner conveys such a physical and emotional transformation for this character that he’s almost unrecognizable. Every character experiences a shift at some point as they get closer to the truth, and in most cases that is when the performances get really good.

The visuals play an important role in Do Not Watch. Throughout the film, the audience is shown flashes of different things. Sometimes it’s the text showing a person’s name and title briefly changing before returning to normal. Other times it’s a mostly grey screen with a black shadow that grows more and more as the mystery unfolds. Sometimes when that shadow appears, there is more text as well. That text sometimes shows warnings to the characters and viewers, and other times it seems to show the inner thoughts of the characters. It’s an unsettling visual element that fuels the growing sense of unease. CGI is used briefly at the climax. Unfortunately, these effects look even more low-budget than the rest of the film. The biggest issue is that the visuals in the climax are incongruent with the visuals leading up to those final moments. Despite the CGI, the other visual elements still leave an inescapable impact on viewers.

Do Not Watch is an intriguing mystery that pulls viewers in as it unravels into chaos and madness. This is a great debut for both Janowitz and Toyama. Together, they created a terrifying found footage film with a unique plot that takes viewers on a journey into the unknown. While at times it can seem a bit too polished, and the bit of CGI shown is lackluster, the ever-growing shadow and text shown throughout make for quite an unsettling film. Both the visuals and the strong performances lend to the creeping sense of dread created by Do Not Watch. If you’re a fan of found footage horror, you won’t want to miss this flick.

OVERALL RATING: 7/10