First season
James Wan, responsible for ‘Insidious’ and ‘The Warren File’, produces this fiction that twists the concept of ‘found footage’
The first bars of ‘Archivo 81’ make it clear that we are facing a very special fiction. Loosely based on a self-titled podcast about two researchers cataloging the work of a missing filmmaker, the Netflix series follows in the footsteps of Dan (Mamoudou Athie), a professional videotape and film reel restoration professional. film, who works for the Pittsburgh Image Museum cleaning all kinds of material. One day a home camcorder tape arrives at the museum complex, ruined. Apparently one of the museum’s benefactors has requested its restoration and the boss puts Dan to work on it.
Upon retrieving the tape, he runs into a young Anthropology student named Melody (Dina Shihabi), who in 1994 decides to move to the Visser Building, an iconic apartment block that was built on the ruins of a mansion that burned down in the 1930s. . The young woman, video camera in hand, plans to interview those who make up that community. Pleased with Dan’s work, the owner of the tape asks Dan to work on the rest of the material that the young woman recorded before the Visser caught fire again. To do this, he must move to a mansion located on the outskirts of the city -a nod to the magnificent ‘The Shining’, by Stephen King-, where there is no coverage and in which the nearest town is 22 kilometers away.
Reluctant at first, Dan finally accepts the assignment after finding in the tape a possible link to his past. From there, immersed more and more in his work, he will try to unravel the mysteries that all those video tapes contain, with the help of Mark, his best friend and the person in charge of a podcast of supernatural stories.
Dina Shihabi, in a still from the series.
Fiction plays with both timelines, Melody’s and Dan’s, twisting and twisting the concept of ‘found footage’ (something like ‘found footage’, a subgenre of horror movies that took its first steps with the bloody and great ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) and was consecrated with ‘The Blair Witch Project’ (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) or films like ‘REC’ (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007) where it is the protagonists themselves who film their story, contributing to the veracity and realism of the story.This is not the case with ‘Archivo 81’, which takes advantage of the tapes recorded by Melody in 1994, but which has no qualms about recreating a part of that story in a more cinematic way, without the constant rattling of handheld cameras.
It does not, however, lose any interest as the mystery unwinds and unwinds with a tight tempo, almost perfect, playing with the love for celluloid, videotapes, VHS, the grain or the artifacts of the tape – the close-ups around the restoration of the tapes are very gratifying- and incorporating into the mix elements typical of golden Hollywood, of ‘The Devil’s Seed’ -the satanic cults- of the aforementioned ‘The Shining’ – is it becoming crazy or is it happening? – or the spiritualism of ‘Poltergeist’. Despite all this, it is not a mix without rhyme or reason, although the series would be better digested if it were broken down into a weekly chapter. It generates restlessness and tension, perhaps not so much terror.
Created by Rebecca Sonnenshine and produced by Sonnenshine, Paul Harris Boardman and James Wan, responsible for sagas such as ‘Insidious’ or ‘The Warren File’, ‘File 81’ has been quite a find. Its open ending is undoubtedly looking for a second season.
The first season of ‘File 81’ is available on Netflix.
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