End Roll (2012) – An Italian Effort that Falls Short…

Plot

An annoying girl, Laura, buys a new HDR camera and starts recording her uninteresting life with it. She takes the camera everywhere she goes, she picks on her roomie Marta using it and she even points the camera directly to the faces of her acquaintances that she meets on the street by chance. After some unexplained events occur at their apartment, Marta confesses a secret to Laura, which she takes carelessly as a joke. Now their lifes are threatened.

Yeah, the premise isn’t good, but also isn’t bad. What’s bad about this movie is how annoying Laura is! The character the actress plays is one of the worst leads I’ve seen in a film (not only found footage; a film in general!). That said, it was hard not roll my eyes at every single thing she did. She is nosy and invades Marta’s privacy. She also does a lot of trash-talk against Marta behind her back, when literally all that Marta does is sit and watch horror films, without even bothering her at all. When the secret is revealed, the attitude Laura takes is a very stupid one and she deserves all of what’s to come…

Plot is a 4/10

Footage

As said in the previous point, Laura films simply because she just got the new camera. That’s nonsense. She records her private conversations with different people, she records herself while sleeping, she records everything just because. No reason at all. Basically the movie is about her daily life, which seems boring, until the climax comes. No one films their life! No one films their friend coming out of the bathroom and comments on how stinky they left it… Yeah, I’m not buying it. This is definitely staged footage.

Footage is a 1/10

Acting

I’m not sure what to say about the acting. The movie is Italian, and given that I don’t speak the language I find it hard to tell whether they’re acting naturally or exaggerating their every line. Whatever it is, I didn’t like Marta’s job. She seemed unexpressive through the whole film. Laura did a decent job though, but her character ruined it all! There is one self-aware character, Mario (I think, I don’t remember his name at all) which was kinda fun but obviated that it was just a movie.
In conclusion, they could have done better.

Acting is a 4/10

Immersion

Finally, as I said before, the fact that Laura films everything for no special reason feels far too forced. Some situations don’t require you to hold your camera in front of everyone, and of course no one would want to carry their camera and film everything perfectly while being chased and stalked by their enemy… There just wasn’t a reason good enough for the entire movie to exist; maybe just a part of it, but not all.

Immersion is a 2/10