Movie Reviews

‘And Her Body Was Never Found’ Takes Found Footage Somewhere New

Published

1 month ago

April 2, 2026

Mor Cohen and Polaris Banks made a film about their real relationship. It opens the way you might expect a film about a real relationship to open, which is to say: uncomfortably.

The film opens on a man masturbating onto his wife’s chest while the two of them sit in a river. This is not a metaphor. Or rather, it is very much a metaphor, but it is also literally happening on screen. He keeps asking her to take her yop off. She doesn’t want to. He keeps asking anyway, because that is what this man does with every limit he runs into, he treats it as a negotiation he is already winning.

This is how And Her Body Was Never Found introduces itself at SXSW 2026. Buckle up.

Two Bodies in the Frame

After the river, the cinematography immediately tells you where you stand. We see the back of her head in close-up, frame-filling, a wall of hair and refusal. He is in the far distance behind her, trying to to keep up. She is not waiting. You read the entire relationship before anyone opens their mouth again.

When they do sit down, she offers him a sandwich. It is a peace offering. It is an olive branch. In the context of this relationship, it is a mistake, because he immediately uses the olive branch to restart the argument. If you have ever loved someone profoundly frustrating, this scene will reach through the screen and grab you by the collar in the most empathetic possible way.

The fight spirals the way real fights spiral, not toward a point but away from one. Semantics get weaponized. He gaslights. The argument rolls over everything except the actual subject. She gets to the point where she raises a stick, and honestly, given the last forty-eight hours, a jury of her peers would understand completely. At the campsite that evening, she tells him she is done. The marriage is over.

The next morning, he says everything right. Every single thing. The full lovebombing playbook: the apology that sounds like he finally gets it, the warmth that feels real, the version of him she fell for showing up right on schedule. Anyone who has ever stood at that crossroads recognizes this moment in their bones. The film does not editorialize. It just watches.

The Cliff Scene

The film’s pivot arrives at a cliff overlook, with something that sounds unmistakably like Wizard of Oz music underneath it. She stands away from the cliff edge, keeping her distance from him. The film makes it clear she is briefly considering how easy it would be to resolve this situation unilaterally. He guilts her onto the ledge through emotional blackmail dressed as a trust exercise.

And then he pushes her.

This is where And Her Body Was Never Found breaks itself open. The take ends. The characters step out. Mor and Polaris are no longer their characters. They are Mor and Polaris, and he is furious about where his hand landed, and she is shaken in a way that does not feel scripted, because it is not scripted, because this part is not the movie anymore. She refuses to continue the scene.

The fourth wall does not just come down here. It gets dismantled and examined.

Blair Witch Country

A cut to night. She is in her tent, filming herself on her phone in vertical format. The frame is narrow and confining. The dark outside is absolute. She says out loud that it would be easy to kill her out here and get rid of the body. Nobody would know.

The Blair Witch Project comparison is not subtle and does not need to be. It is being invoked consciously, as a reference point for what it feels like when the camera becomes the only witness. The found footage mode here is not an aesthetic choice so much as evidence collection, and the film is smart about what that implies.

The film’s formal announcement that it is a meta project, two filmmakers making something about their own fights, arrives here. It reconfigures everything that preceded it without invalidating any of it.

Hat on a Hat on a Hat

This is also where the film begins to strain, just slightly. And Her Body Was Never Found has already broken the fourth wall once, then reconstructed it, then broken it again. Characters comment on the layers. The commentary becomes its own layer.

The film ends somewhere past the point where you can usefully track what is cinema and what is meta and what is real. That disorientation is partly the point. It is also, at a certain moment past the film’s last clean beat, a miscalculation. The movie keeps going after it has already landed.

What Banks and Cohen Got Right

A lot, is the answer. The performance dynamics are precise in a way that indie horror rarely achieves. The cinematography is working on multiple levels simultaneously. The abuse arc is drawn with enough specificity to feel observed rather than constructed, which is not a small thing when both filmmakers are also the subjects.

Polaris Banks and Mor Cohen are making something genuinely new here. Other critics at SXSW noted how cleverly written the film is. That is true. It is also, in places, too clever for its own good, and the film never entirely resolves the tension between those two facts. The overreach at the end does not undo what precedes it. It just means the thing that is most impressive about this project, the willingness to keep pushing the structure past the point of comfort, is also the thing that gets it into trouble in the final ten minutes.

At seventy-five minutes, it is still a tight film that keeps the tension high and earns most of its ambition. The structural risks it takes are real risks, not aesthetic posturing. And the film it is in conversation with, the long tradition of found footage as emotional exposure, is richer for having this in it.

Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Movie Reviews

Self Driver Runs Out of Road

Published

13 hours ago

May 12, 2026

Luna Gray

Every few years someone makes a movie where a desperate person takes the money and watches his conscience become negotiable. I am always there for it. Cheap Thrills. Would You Rather. The whole subgenre of moral erosion for cash that does not have a name but absolutely should. Self Driver walks directly into that territory and for the first half of its runtime, it delivers.

Nathanael Chadwick plays D, a cab driver trying to keep his head above water, who gets recruited onto a mysterious new rideshare app that promises fast money and asks for increasingly terrible things in return.

Writer-director Michael Pierro shot this on cellphones with a skeleton crew. That constraint should work against the film. For the first act, it does not. Chadwick earns your sympathy without doing anything obvious to ask for it, and Pierro keeps things tense enough that the premise does exactly what it is supposed to do.

Then the psychedelic angle shows up.

I want to be fair about this. I understand the intention. But it lands the way a plot fix lands. You feel the seam. By the halfway point the script has accumulated a lot of threads, and the psychedelic detour is where those threads stop being pulled. They do not resolve. They just stop mattering.

That is the consistent frustration with Self Driver. It is not short on ideas. It is short on follow-through. Almost every interesting thing Pierro introduces gets picked up, examined, and set back down before it earns its place in the film. The bones of something genuinely great are visible throughout. The second half just never shows up to finish the job.

Chadwick won Best Actor at Grimmfest for this role, and it is not hard to understand why. He is doing real work here. He makes D worth following even when the film is not fully following through on its own premise. That is harder than it looks.

Self Driver is out now on UK digital via GrimmVision. At 2.5 out of 5, it is worth your time if you have patience for low-budget genre work and can make peace with a film that is better than it finishes. Pierro has instincts. Watch for his next one.

Indie Horror

Panic Fest 2026 Review: ‘Frogman Returns’ Is A Thrilling Sequel That Goes For The Croak!

Published

6 days ago

May 6, 2026

Jacob Davison

Horror as a genre has a greater propensity for sequels than almost anything else in the world of cinema. There have been scores of slasher sequels from the likes of Friday The 13th to A Nightmare on Elm Street to even sequels to seemingly stand-alone affairs like The Exorcist and The Blair Witch Project. While some may be seen as cash grabs or of diminishing returns, it cannot be argued that there have been some phenomenal sequels to horror films such as Aliens and Evil Dead 2 among many others. So imagine my pleasant surprise to see that 2023’s Frogman is back in the aptly named Frogman Returns!

The sequel picks up not too long after the original’s cryptid catastrophe. The Loveland, Ohio Frogman and surrounding cult that was exposed by amateur filmmaker Dallas (Nathan Tymoshuk) has since disappeared and the terror of the magic wand wielding amphibian seemingly ended. Having lost his friend Scotty (Benny Barrett) and a falling out with Amy (Chelsey Grant), Dallas has found a new life heading a cryptid reality web show. But when strange forces call him and his team back to Loveland, will he have to face the Frogman for a final battle?

I was a big fan of the original Frogman upon release, and was interested in seeing where director Anthony Cousins was going to take the story. I’m happy to report that he did the best kind of thing you can do for a sequel like this: made it weirder and wilder! Not only is there Frogman, but a number of classic cryptids have encounters as the genie is out of the bottle and Dallas irrevocably proved that there are truly monsters among us. There is a pretty memorable scene involving a run-in with the living pants-like Fresno Nightcrawler creature that establishes what a brave and bizarre new world things have become since the previous film. Monsters are basically a fact of life now. So, of course, people are finding ways to profit from it.

Dallas’ arc continues from the first film and I do like how he carries the weight and guilt of Scotty’s disappearance and his disconnection with Amy. There are real consequences to the ways things went wrong previously and Dallas is haunted by the consequences of his obsession. Now he attempts to make things right in some form as his adventures bring him back to where it all began. And for those here for Frogman… without spoiling too much, everyone’s favorite amphibious cryptid does make a triumphant return. With a neon explosive finale that left me craving even more.

Frogman Returns does a fine job of documenting the new adventure in the traditional found footage format, with the foundation of Dallas’ new reality web show keeping the cameras rolling. Combining that with ample and memorable practical fx for all manner of beasts and gore to see. Exploding heads, zapped limbs, and so much more get captured on camera in all their visceral glory.

Overall, if you were a fan of the first Frogman, then Frogman Returns is a more than worthwhile follow up to digest.

Indie Horror

Panic Fest 2026 Review: ‘Creature Of The Pines’ Is An Interesting Found Footage Horror That Walks A Beaten Path

Published

1 week ago

May 5, 2026

Jacob Davison

There are certain parts of the world that have an inherent evil or cursed nature to them. The Bermuda Triangle, where so many ships have vanished in its waters. Death Valley, where many have met their end in the unforgiving desert. And then there’s The Pine Barrens of New Jersey. A woodland infamous for the cryptid named The Jersey Devil.

While The Jersey Devil may be the mascot or face of sorts for the area, there are other dangers within those woods. Specifically, an area known as Pine Hollow. Infamous for numerous disappearances of local and hikers. While some attribute it to natural hazards, others say the source of these incidents may be tied to folklore. An ancient mimic of indigenous legend that targets those wandering its woods. After a trio of hikers disappear and leaves only one shell shocked survivor and witness wandering the wilderness, a documentary crew attempts to clarify between fact and fiction… only to find themselves subject to their own torments.

Creature Of The Pines is a decent found footage/mockumentary endeavor, and I’m always a sucker for that kind of framing. I will also give points for taking an original approach on the region rather than using a more well known cryptid or monster. Instead, crafting their own beast with the shapeshifting demon of indigenous lore. It did make it more interesting than relying on a more infamous antagonist, allowing the movie to make up its own rules and history behind the titular creature.

Unfortunately, the story does fall into a lot of the cliches of the sub-genre as well. Lots of scenes building up strange sounds coming form the woods leading to some shaky cam segments as a character is dragged off by an unseen force and such. The talking heads portions of the mockumentary featured some decent actors and subjects that kept things fairly fresh. Especially the former forest ranger who discussed the dark and terrible history of Pine Hollow.

Even still, the third act was kind of a mixed bag with the final confrontation and reveal of the horror. Ambiguity tends to work better in found footage for a reason, sometimes its better to leave the evil up to the imagination. There’s also a twist to the ending that felt a bit obvious considering the build up.

But, if you’re a big fan of found footage and mockumentary horror like I am, (especially for New England based horror) then Creature Of The Pines is worth at least a watch.