Motion Detected is a nearly solo character horror about a woman losing her mind to a home security system. Co-written and co-directed by Justin Gallaher and Sam Roseme in their directorial debuts, this got off to a weak start and never really managed to find its footing, with disparate elements that never really came together in a satisfying way.
After experiencing a terrifying home invasion in which she was nearly killed by a serial killer dubbed 'El Diablo', Julie (Katelyn MacMullen) and her husband, Miguel (Carlo Mendez) have moved from Mexico City to the U.S.A. Julie is suffering PTSD about her ordeal and so is very concerned about security at their new house. Luckily, the house they are renting has a state of the art security system which includes an A.I, the security system named Diablo by unlucky coincidence. With Miguel called back to Mexico on business, Julie is left on her own, and it is at this point that she starts to have trouble with Diablo. The system seems to have a mind of its own, constantly stating the titular "motion detected" around various parts of the house, and this, coupled with Julie's PTSD induced nightmares and hallucinations, sees her mind start to slowly unravel.
Even after a poor prologue in which a little girl is lured into a cupboard by a glitchy figure, I was prepared to give the movie a chance. It at the very least looked good, with decent camera work and some fine editing (aside from the weird way the protagonist's nightmares are edited together with footage of her sleeping in bed). The story at first glance reminded me a lot of Dean Koontz' classic horror novel Demon Seed, which itself had a similar story of a woman being tormented by her A.I security system. The problem here was that things were spread a little too thinly. For the longest time it isn't really clear if the security system is just bust, or if it is maliciously causing the woman problems. With Julie's PTSD, it wasn't clear if maybe her imagination is getting the better of her, there was even a feel that the root cause could be supernatural in nature, as objects move on their own, and doors open and close on their own. Without going into spoilers, it went in an unsatisfying direction that stretched credibility. By the point the security system was running a live feed of Julie's nightmares, in order to digitally create a hard light hologram of her nightmare aggressor, my credibility had snapped and I was unable to take anything else that happened seriously.
There is a cast of just seven characters, but mainly it is Julie on her own. The best scenes of the film involve only her, I liked the first solo drinking montage she had, and I liked her constant prayers to the Mother of Death statue she had. The dialogue wasn't the best at times, one key scene which was so bad I even wrote it down. Speaking online to her therapist about her paranoid belief the security system was tormenting her, the therapist (Kimberli Flores) states "Why don't you just disable your alarm?", to which Julie dramatically replies "I...Don't...Know...How!", that part was unintentionally funny to me. As for her husband, he was portrayed as so sickeningly devoted and loving to Julie that I came to suspect he was either off cheating on her, or he was secretly orchestrating things from behind the scenes. It turns out, mild spoiler, that no, he has nothing to do with anything. Barely being in the movie and adding so little, I don't even know why he existed, other than to call her up every few days to state he is still stuck in a never ending gauntlet of business based meals.
The horror just wasn't scary, the CG effects used to show glitchy figures moving around the house looked too clean, the scary things that happen were more irritating than anything, and attempts to expand the scope of the single house story never worked well. Motion Detected had a good idea as a basis, but the direction this went in was a bit far fetched. The film came out today, May 19th, on Cable VOD and Digital HD, from Freestyle Digital Media.
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