The Washington County Disappearances (2022)

Directed by Robert Joseph Farmer [Other horror films: N/A]

I’ve said again and again that found footage is such an up-and-down style. Some found footage movies are great, whereas others are really quite poor. Unfortunately, I would have to say that The Washington County Disappearances is an example of the latter.

I’ll give the movie props for a potentially interesting mystery. A young woman goes missing from the local college, and as it turns out, young women have gone missing for over a decade from the same area, and no one knows why. It also turns out that all of these women were to be married prior to their disappearance, as the main character (played by director Robert Joseph Farmer) finds out later in the film.

Is a local professor of the college involved? Is it a government-run medical experiment? Is it Bigfoot stealing women to mate with? Is it the Russkie, wanting revenge for the USA’s actions during the Cold War?

Well, those are all interesting questions, but to save you time, we never really find out, at least with any satisfactory answer. We don’t know why these women are abducted, we don’t know what’s with the cages, we don’t know what’s with the ‘Save the Date’ message at the end, and we don’t know why the main character was so idiotic during his search of a suspect house during the last 25 minutes of the movie.

There’s a lot of unanswered questions here, but I want to be clear: that in itself is not a problem. It makes sense that, in a found footage film with a limited focus, the character recording may not actually find out anything in the way of answers. What bothers me is that there was a decently interesting mystery here – I was personally wondering if the local authorities were complicit in covering up these abductions, for instance – but not only do we not get any answers, but the main character never posits any possible solutions.

Look, I don’t think Robert Joseph Farmer was that good – some of his dialogue delivery was rather poor, sometimes overly dramatic, often not sounding realistic – and as he’s the only real character of note, that’s not great. Even so, I don’t think a poor performance here is that damning. Obviously I’d prefer a better one, but not even the best performance could make up for what I see as problems with the story, which is why I don’t often have major critiques of actors or actresses. To me, that’s largely secondary to the story, and I imagine most of them do the best they can with what they have.

I will say, though, that the main character wasn’t particularly great. He’s panicked over his missing fiancée, and the fact that the local authorities aren’t up to all that much isn’t helping whatsoever. Even so, toward the end of the film, he sees a gun in the far end of a dog cage. He crawls into the cage to retrieve the gun, but he doesn’t move quickly – in fact, once he grabs the gun, he waits a few moments before trying to get back out – and gets locked into the cage. Perhaps it’s just me, but that scene alone turned me off this guy.

Also, I have to speak about the final 20 or so minutes of the film. For about 15 of these minutes, the camera the main character was using was having problems – the light kept flashing. For ten solid minutes, the light flashed off and on; I almost thought I’d get a seizure watching this, and I definitely developed a minor headache because of that sequence. It reminded me of the most visually-unappealing sequence I’ve ever seen in a movie, being the end of Feast III: The Happy Finish, in which much the same thing happened.

Oh, and because this is a found footage movie, it’s claimed to be real footage. The beginning says that this was released under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552 in order to help solve the ongoing investigation. It’d help if, at any point during this movie or the information text before or after, it listed what state that Washington County was in, but hey, I guess that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. We know it’s somewhere in the midwest, but I guess that’s all that the authorities wanted people to know insofar as the location was involved.

I don’t mean to be nit-picky, but I’m really tired of found footage films that say “Hey, this footage was found by the [insert random police department] and the identities of the assailants remain unknown.” I’m sick of found footage films trying to seem like they’re authentic footage. Here, at least there was no supernatural claim made (or was there?????????????), but I just find the whole thing quite old. It doesn’t make the movie any better, and honestly, if anything, just turns me off the film more.

There’s nothing in The Washington County Disappearances that I think would amaze many people. None of this is to say that the film is without it’s merits – there are a handful of okay scenes and, toward the end, some decent imagery (one of which was used as the poster of the film, to decent effect).

If you’re a fan of films in the found footage style, I’d recommend checking this out. Personally, I find much of the film boring and the finale unsatisfactory, but I’m also not a giant found footage guy, so it may well work for some.

Overall, though, this wasn’t it, brahs.

4/10