The Covenant
September 11, 2006
I decided to watch this film because the premise looked interesting. The backstory to the film is that there were five families in Essex county with supernatural powers that are somehow hereditary, and one of the families was banished. The other four families continued to live in the area, thinking that they are the only ones left. Then one day, a member of the fifth family returns…..
From watching the preview and the opening few minutes, this is obviously a ‘teen’ film. All of the main characters were people that seemed somewhat familiar, but this film was their first. I think that seeing so many films set in high schools and colleges gives a feeling of familiarity to these films. Initially, some of the corny dialog and the setup in the first few scenes made me worry about the film a little. But the darker elements of the film came into play fairly quickly, and the predictable nature of the film melted away a lot.
The setting is Massachusetts in autumn, and the atmospere is developed throughout the film very well. There is the usual suspension of disbelief required in watching the actors. They all played their parts nicely, but none of them looked remotely like people in high school, which is where I think they were meant to be. The female lead, Laura Ramsey, turns 24 this year as an example (according to IMDB). The special effects are very good, but not unusually so for this day and age.
I think that the film could have done with more back story to develop things. Throughout the film the way that the magic works, how people came to have the powers, what people have done with them through the ages, etc are not really explained in detail. This feels intentional, like the mystery surrounding the powers is something that the audience should feel, but it also creates the feeling that rules are being made up as you go along. I think that the best fantasy and science fiction universes have the quality of explaining a lot of the restrictions and rules of the universe early on and demonstrating the ramifications of that throughout the story. I think that this gives an immersive quality to the fiction, whereas introducing new rules constantly breaks the illusion.
The storyline put the protagonist into a pickle that did make me curious about how he would get out of it, but I don’t think that I was wondering if he would get out of it. I don’t know why, but the film never had the feeling that it would kill people off. Not that I like to watch people die, but it does make things feel less predictable when characters die. In the end, the ending was one of the possibilities that I thought of while watching, but it was not done in a super predictable way, and I did appreciate that.
All in all, this is a nice weekend film. I think that the current IMDB rating of 4.4 is harsh - the acting is solid, the story is original and the production values are sound. I think that some people cannot look past the patina of a summer teen flick and see the film for what it is, but I can see past it and I liked what I saw.
