Following the death of her mother, Nicole (Agnes Brooker) returns to her childhood home to discover a series of creepy happenings. She then disappears during a Skype conversation with her young daughter. Nicole’s moody sister, Anna (Caity Lotz) turns up and tries to work out what is terrorising her family.
As horror films go, The Pact is not that scary. Ignoring a few sudden bangs, it fails to raise the pulse. Nonetheless, it does do a good job of avoiding the farcical haunted-house traps that these sort of films can fall into, and the mystery in the plot is tied up with some surprisingly satisfying twists. With a dry and dingy California setting, it is refreshing to see ghosts haunting less obnoxious Americans without enormous swimming pools.
Also, The Pact makes interesting use of the internet, combining it with fears of invasion and being watched. Skype, Wikipedia and smart phones are weaved into the plot and Google Street View even becomes a channel to the ‘other side’. Yet the film’s excitement to show off these new and innovative techniques means that occasionally the internal logic falls to pieces (at one point, a menacing, but nonetheless human and alive, person becomes inexplicably invisible on camera). Even the characters themselves start to pick at the plot holes; in regards to a mid-film revelation, a visiting policeman notes incredulously that ‘you lived here all your life and never noticed?!’
Despite the inconsistencies (e.g. why you would name a film The Pact, when it makes no references to pacts of any sort?), it is not a horror film that insists on doing weird things for no reason and then justifying it with a cop-out ‘we-will-never-know’ ending. The above mentioned happenings are all explained and in ways unexpected.
In reality, The Pact is a pleasantly warped murder mystery with a convenient supernatural element. To keep those that came for the screams happy, there is one gory scene, a sequence of (unnecessary) telekinetic bouncing off walls, and a tense face-off finale. But these moments are anomalies. The plot moves on at steady pace, playing with your expectations, offering misdirection in a digital age rethinking of the oft-repeated scary house story. It is a well packaged offering (if a bit faulting when you look too closely at the details) and has a few rewarding plot twists, but will probably leave you somewhat underwhelmed.