Review: A SENSE OF DREAD

A SENSE of DREAD, written by Greg McGowen and directed by Michael Peter Bolus is a slow-burn mystery/conspiracy film.

Four men, strangers all, are recruited as contractors to work for a mysterious company and sent on what appears to be a routine clean-up mission to an abandoned base. Samuels (Kevin McCorkle) is the IT guy. Michaels (Michael Peter Bolus) is maintenance and is full of world-weary sarcasm. O’Neel (Michael Town) seems like a catch-all everyman, while Mac (Greg McGowen) is nominally the guy in charge.

The gig sounds fairly straightforward: a six-week tour, clear out the old tech, secure the data in the systems, and get the place ready for new operations. After a short interview, our team is dumped unceremoniously on a small, remote, airfield’s tarmac—no phones, no communication, no...nothing. Ominously so.

Soon, they get the base’s communication system up and running, and weird things begin happening. They pick up a transmission: sixteen numbers, repeating in sequence. Samuels thinks these numbers are coordinates pointing to a location somewhere quite close. Mac finds archival video footage of a woman named Dr. Louise Caldwell, in what appears to be a journal of the last group there, one that was never heard from again. Naturally, he decides to keep this video to himself.

Then the hits keep on coming: mystery blood stains, bloody clothing, strange visions, strange voices, dead animals - it all adds up to a shocking conclusion!

Well, sort of. Being an old hand at indie filmmaking, my first thought was this felt like the production team had access to an interesting location and decided to build a story around it. Which, of course, is indie filmmaking 101: Use what you got!

I think they were mostly successful, first and foremost because the cast put in stellar performances, and it was a treat seeing the four actors play off of one another. However, I think some of the musing and camaraderie could have been cut down to inject in more weirdness and dread faster, and there was a bit of uneveness in tone at times, where a character is freaking out/having something weird happen in one scene, but is fine in the next. I also don't think that a little more blood and action overall would have hurt things, either.

But at the end of the day, A SENSE OF DREAD was a stong piece of character-acting work. It felt like a genuine conspiracy was unfolding throughout the story, and it kept the mystery going right up until the very end.