Jabroni Leon The premise is that filmmaker Maggie Price (played by Alba, who runs on empty in every scene until you forget she's the main) takes her crew to investigate a Jim Jones-esque massacre from 25 years ago, along with the lone survivor of the killing, Sarah Hope (played by Lily Rabe straddling general boredom and genuine creepiness). What Maggie forgets to mention to Sarah until THE DRIVE UP THERE is that she has a personal stake in this: her father was the lead agent in the FBI sting, and he killed himself some months later, "tearing their family apart".The rest of the crew is made up of obviously future-dead people, so here's how I remember them: Christian, Maggie's soon-to-be-dead brother whose actor gives a performance that is both sleepy and subtle; Matt, the dead practical one; Nick, the dead asshole played by Dan Egan, so he has maybe two funny lines before death; Ann, the dead whiny one; and Jill, the dead annoying one. There's also Ed the grip.This is my first problem with the movie. Other than those generalizations of the characters, I could not tell you anything else about them, and I don't really care to. I know horror films haven't tried to make you care about the dead meat in about two decades, but this film doesn't even try. Instead of allowing the audience some time to relate to the characters and be, y'know SAD when they die, we instead watch multiple-angle tapes of cult leader Jim Jacobs (Thomas Jane in a divisive performance that I'm going to say errs on the side of goofy) doing cult things.The film essentially aims to explore one question: What if Jim Jones was totally right about whatever nonsense he was spouting at the time and it was the government that wrongly killed hundreds? That is not a question I would choose to entertain, but if done well, I could suspend my disbelief and discomfort with it. But the film makes the fatal flaw of introducing a supernatural bent in the third act. It turns out the cult was right and learned to basically astral project their souls, but they were interrupted when the Price siblings' father burst in, killing them all unintentionally.This movie simply did not need to be supernatural in the slightest. It had definite legs in being an honest suspense horror that instead explored how cultist ideologies affect its victims, how suicide affects families, and how we perceive cults as intrinsically "wrong". Instead, I was left with endless questions. How did every member of the cult achieve the "three nails" needed to gain full astral projection? Some were children who definitely would not have the discipline to do this, and yet they all take the poison together. Also, they expected one woman to revive all of them after six minutes but before a single person died? What happens to the crew's souls when they're killed and taken over? The person in Christian's body says he's "not here anymore" but within two lines of dialogue Sarah says "who wouldn't want eternal life?" to appeal to Maggie and then at the end Jacobs in a new body says they're going to eat souls and make an immortal army (???), so are their souls in purgatory,are they completely gone, or have they passed through the veil? Sarah also does her "they're not dead; he'll bring them back" spiel when surrounded by the crew's bodies at the end, so are they next in line for the resurrection train? If so, why not just resurrect them in their own bodies?Was there an FBI investigation after the sting? If not, why not and has the person who didn't sign off on an investigation get justly fired? If so, why didn't they scour every ounce of land that was owned by the cult? Sarah leads them to a hidey-hole with invaluable tapes that further the plot, but the fact that it was "hidden" doesn't mean much. A real investigation into a crime of this proportion would have had FBI boots on every pebble, river, and ramshackle structure that was on Jacobs's land and maybe even the land surrounding it.Besides character and plot flaws, the direction is somewhat unmemorable, the special effects were passable, and the cinematography of dirty sadness that every horror cinematographer likes right now is getting old. Perhaps the best part of this film was the length. It was a standard 90 minutes, but it felt like half that time. Maybe I went into a fugue during most of the bickering between the crew and that shortened the time for me.This film is mostly just sad to me because it really had a lot of potential but chose to take a route for which it wasn't interested in explaining the rules behind, and this frustrated me more than anything. If the found footage bits were a) significantly shortened and b) only from one angle, the way they should be; if the characters and their motivations or at the very least more personality traits were more dynamic and better defined; if the supernatural angle was removed and replaced with a sense of dread and shock that this man really had an innocent group of people (and maybe even himself) fooled; then maybe The Veil would have been a better movie.

suite92 The Three Acts: The initial tableaux: Jim Jacobs runs a cult camp at Heaven's Veil Ranch, circa 1982. He's a self- appointed mage who does miraculous healing and the like. He does meditation, astral projections, telekinesis, and whatever else will inspire loyalty. His big draw, though, is promising techniques to gain eternal life.Yeah, right.The trick is, one has to die first before getting the big dividend. Indeed, every one at Heaven's Veil does die back in 1982, save for Sarah Hope.Spin forward to the present, roughly. Sarah Hope is recruited by Maggie Price and her brother Christian to do a documentary on the Ranch. Maggie's father was the FBI agent in charge of investigating the Veil, and he ended up hanging himself when Maggie was three years old.Delineation of conflicts: As one might expect, things start to go badly soon after the film starts.The caretaker of Heaven's Veil was not all that welcoming. Film crew member Ed takes the group's van and kills himself by running into a tree at high speed. The group is more than a bit isolated by distance, since they are now all on foot.Sarah finds the more secret parts of the place, which include multiple films of the inner workings of Jim Jacobs' group. The filmmakers hope to find out what the driving forces were behind the mass death at Heaven's Veil. Does something or someone at the Veil want those secrets kept secret?Resolution: The film jumped the shark around 53:00 in. The transition from somewhat reasonable thriller to wholesale supernatural bullshit was sudden. The turnabout at the end was well-written, but I had long since quit caring.

elizrug I am the biggest critic of horror films. If there's just one thing that doesn't seem right, I automatically dislike a film. I really liked this, though.It has a unique story, one that hasn't been touched upon very often: scary cults. It has a good cast who all work well together. There's not too much crappy dialogue, like the ubiquitous "Die you f-ing b****!" that is found in a lot of movies. (I've never understood how someone, who is fighting for their life, could be thinking of screaming cuss words at an attacker, and I curse like a truck driver.) I'm not a huge fan of Jessica Alba but this role worked for her.The scares were a success. I jumped a couple of times.Overall I think it's a very good scary movie. Is it Oscar-worthy? No, but that's not why I watched it.

TheBarleyGuy Take a deep breath, surprisingly this is NOT a found footage movie. With that said, I almost wish that it was. What it is, instead, is a combination of found footage elements and traditional narrative film making. Here's the problem: the two do not mix well, and create a bit of a mess. I understand the desire to combine the two, but it just doesn't work, and you get a movie like The Veil.Perhaps the most bizarre part of the movie are the writer and director. Phil Joanou helmed the piece, and this is the man responsible for that Punisher short that everyone liked, the Dwanye Johnson vehicle Gridiron Gang, and 3 U2 documentaries, while the script was penned by Robert Ben Garant, who wrote Hell Baby, and A Night At The Museum 2 when he wasn't starring in Reno 911. These forces came together to make an ultimately bland mess of a horror film.The movie stars Jessica Alba (Sin City), Thomas Jane (The Punisher), and Lily Rabe (American Horror Story) along with a lovable cast of dead-meat characters, as they head to the site of what is basically Jonestown (without calling it Jonestown). Once they are here, a weird mixture of horror clichés, jump scares, and lazy tropes lead to their deaths. Spoiler alert, I guess. The performances are fine, everyone brings about as much as they can to this particular script, but all in all the "star power" on show here isn't enough to save it.The main story, of Alba and her team headed back to the site of the massacre, is edited to be dark, high contrast, however the rest of the film isn't edited to match that. At one point, when looking at photos taken of their campsite, the photos are clearly of the real environment and they clash massively with the look of the film. I understand stylistic choices of editing, and wouldn't even begrudge them that if it all matched up. However, they different parts of the film clash so much that it almost feels like two movies crammed together, cobbled together with fair-ground haunted house level scares.The scary moments have no cohesion, they simply exist to give you a jolt and to make you feel like this movie is scary, which it really isn't. The movie also includes a lot of "watching the tapes we found in the spooky house", and those really don't worth either. It seems like The Veil can't decide what movie it wants to be, and that really hurts it more than anything else.All in all this really doesn't work. The story is a mess and flies all over the place, and it feels more like a "Yeah whatever, bro, let's make a scary movie. People will eat up any old s**t in that genre", than anything else. I really hope 2016 picks up from here, but it's hard to feel too optimistic.