"St. Agatha" Review by Anthony T

Darren Lynn Bousman has become one of my favorite horror directors over the years. Whether its films like “Saw II”, Repo: The Genetic Opera and “The Barrens”, I’ve always had a good time with watching them. Once I heard that “St. Agatha” was coming out, I knew I had to check it out because his film are usually good.

The film is about a pregnant woman in 1950s Georgia who moves into a Covent to have her child. What seems to be a nice place turns into a nightmare for her, when she finds out the dark secrets that lie within the Covent. Now she must try and find a way out and save herself and her child before she becomes trapped in the wall of the Covent forever.

Going to this I was really hoping that St Agatha would’ve been a good film since I’m a huge fan of Darren Lynn Bousman. So much so that I was very interested in seeing this film. Sadly, I was fooled. “St Agatha is a very boring film from start to finish and I might even go far and say that this is Brousman’s worst film even though he had no input on the film’s screenplay Bousman isn’t given much to work with as he wasn’t one of the shopping list of screenwriters credited on the film. Bousman does a good job with the way the film looks as it has a dark look and dark feel to it. That is the only good thing that I have say about this film as everything else in his direction sucked. He doesn’t do a good job with the way he directs his cast. Every performance in the film felt like they were hitting one note and that’s it. It tells me that either the cast wasn’t engaged in the material or the way the characters were written. You need both of those elements for a film like this to succeed. This film doesn’t have that and that’s why Bousman is partly responsible for this lifeless film.

When you have multiple screenwriters, sometimes it hurts the overall screenplay. The screenplay for this film was atrocious as I lay most of the blame to the screenwriters. One of the reasons that this screenplay fails was the fact that they are way too many flashback scenes. This film spends too much time going back and forth between the main story and backstory of the main character. When a story like this does that, it tends to make the length of the film feel even longer. This film felt like it was fifteen minutes too long as some scenes could’ve been shorten. The other thing that I didn’t like was the fact that this film moves very slowly. The screenwriters don’t do a good job making sure that the main character was interesting. I couldn’t get into the main character because the character felt bland. When you have a main character that is bland, it is hard to get into the story. This was the case with me as I didn’t care about the character here thus making this a boring film.

Please avoid this film as was boring from the opening minute to the end. If you want to something in similar tone that is good from Darren Lynn Brousman, rent “Abbatior” or “The Barrens’. Those are more effective films and more worth your time than “St Agatha”.

Review Rating: 1 Star