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Jackson (Ben Lloyd-Hughes), his sister Angela (Florence Pugh), and
their friends Elliot (Scott Chambers) and Beth (Georgina Bevan) are
paranormal investigators who have a pretty good track record of taking
spirits from this world into the next, with Jackson being the team's
mastermind, Angela the medium, Elliot the cameraman and Beth in charge of
technology - and they're 100% frauds, their operation being nothing but a
get-rich-quick scheme. But of late, Angela wants out, as on one hand she
starts to feel guilt, on the other she actually starts to see spirits -
and then the gang gets an offer they can't refuse, to investigate a former
foster home where girls were brutally slaughtered and their mouths
stitched shut by the son of the owner, Herman. And since then, the owner
of the house and Herman's mother Mrs Green (Celie Imrie) is hearing
ghostly screams every night, or at least things she is. But other than
that, she seems to be a very reasonable woman who's not as easy to fool by
the team's trickery as their usual clients - but it soon becomes apparent
they don't actually have to relie on their bag of tricks, the house is
actually haunted by the kids who were killed there - they're just not the
actual threat. Eventually, Elliot has an accident, Beth vanishes and
re-appears with her mouth stitched up, and Jackson has a conversation with
Mrs Green that frightens him to the bones. So eventually he calls it
quits, collects his team and they leave off in their car - to hit a tree
while still on the premises. Which is not a good thing, as they now find
out that Herman (Niall Greig Fulton) the child killer's still alive, and
he's not in a good mood ... Now there is nothing in Malevolent
that hasn't been done before - in fact fraudulent paranormal investigators
encountering real ghosts is pretty much a horror cliché by now. But that
said, the film's rather well-made, doesn't let its story be smothered by
spectacle, and the cast's uniformly relatable, while their characters are
rather well fleshed out. Not a classic by any standards, but pretty solid
slightly run-of-the-mill genre entertainment.
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