Producers: Aleksander Denisyuk, Viktor Denisyuk, Vladimir Denisyuk, Aleksander Kurinskiy, Evgeniy Melentev. Irina Prokhozhay and Nikolay Tabashnikov   Director: Serik Beiseu   Screenplay: Dmitriy Zhigalov, Uliana Zakrevskaya and Sergey Kaluzhanov   Cast: Artur Beschastnyy, Maryana Spivak, Sofya Shidlovskaya, Igor Grabuzov, Sergey Safronov, Valeria Kot, Ilya Vinogorsky, Kirill Rusin, Artem Fadeev, Rival Batyrov, Ivan Rysin, Marina Grishakova, Semen Dorin, Maxim Ivanov and Kirill Yakushenko   Distributor: Well Go USA Entertainment

Grade: D+

Horror clichés abound in Serik Beiseu’s haunted-house movie, which is further hobbled by confusing chronological shifts and dubbing that leaves its sound world seeming hollow rather than creepy.

The picture, which tries to hide its Russian origins, begins with four teens—Yana (Sofya Shidlovskaya), Julie (Valeria Kot), Ron (Ilya Vinogorsky) and Kevin (Kirill Rusin)—breaking into the boarded-up mansion in the woods outside town.  As they look around, Ron disappears, which leads to a police investigation headed by local cop Nick (Igor Grabuzov).  But soon there arrives Paul (Artur Beschastnyy) from the big city.

Nick and Paul have a history with the place.  When they were youngsters (Paul played by Artem Fadeev and Nick by Rival Batyrov), they had entered the place with friends Arthur (Ivan Rysin) and Sofia (Marina Grishakova) at the behest of Arthur, who’d researched the place and concluded that a treasure was hidden there.  But all they discovered was an old cylinder phonograph, which emitted a ghostly whisper when played; waiting outside, Nick’s younger brother Tommy (Semen Dorin) suffered a seizure and was struck dead.

Now Paul is suffering an emotional crisis.  His son Luke (Maxim Ivanov) was injured in a car crash when Paul swerved to avoid an apparition of Tommy in the road and hit a tree; the boy is in a coma, and Paul’s wife has left him.  Mourning his losses, Paul has turned to drink, and he’s returned home to unravel the truth about the mansion.  He reconnects with Sofia (Maryana Spivak), a widow with whom Yana and Julie live in hostile coexistence, and tracks down Arthur (Sergey Safronov), who’s continued his research and explains why the mansion is haunted by a spirit called Mara (Kirill Yakushenko), which takes control of people through the whispers on the phonograph and roams catacombs that run underground from the mansion to the cluttered basement of Sofia’s house.  The tunnels naturally become the locale for the final confrontation between the forces of semi-good and very-evil. 

Beiseu shows some aptitude for this sort of thing; he, cinematographer Kirill Zotkin and editor Konstantin Kvetkin manage some fairly effective suspense sequences and jump scares, while production designer Tatyana Zinchenko fashions a few creepy interiors and Konstantin Poznekov and Sergey Lebedev contribute an ominous score. 

But in the end “Whisper of the Witch” is derailed by a plot that, despite the efforts of the writers to introduce some twists and surprises, ends up feeling both commonplace and silly (a cylinder phonograph, after all, is not inherently scary), by chronological back-and-forths that dilute the tension rather than enhancing it, and by acting that, at least in the dubbed version, comes across as clumsy.  It resembles the old piano the teens find in the mansion at the beginning of the movie—the keyboard sounds, though the inside mechanism has been gutted.  Beiseu’s movie makes some genre noise, but ultimately proves an empty contraption.   

Producers: Kelly Hays, Benjamin Cooke and Jason Eric Perlman     Director: Jason Eric Perlman   Screenplay: Jason Eric Perlman    Cast: Jake McLaughlin, Theo Rossi, Miki Ishikawa, Yoson An, Danni Wang, Kavi Raz, Clyde Kusatsu, Neagheen Homaifar, Eric Whitten, Hiroshi Otaguro, Corey Jung, Vince Foster, Arielle Kebbel and Carson Minnear   Distributor: Blue Fox Entertainment

Grade: D+

Ambition is one thing certainly not lacking in writer-director Jason Eric Perlman’s second feature, which meshes together such heady subjects as dangerous scientific experimentation, wartime atrocities, transgenerational trauma, fraught family dynamics and capitalist greed into a single narrative.  It’s hardly surprising that as edited by Brian Zwiener “Site” pretty much collapses under the weight of everything it’s trying to do and say, though it’s a rather fascinating, if impenetrable, failure.

It all begins in Harbin, China, in 1931, where a family—parents Jiang and Xifeng and their young son Guang (Yoson An, Danni Wang and Corey Jung) —are arrested by Japanese invading forces and taken to an internment camp where the infamous Unit 731 of the Imperial Army, under the leadership of the malevolent Ichiro (Hiroshi Otaguro), is brutalizing and experimenting on the prisoners.  Interspersed with those brief scenes are equally short ones of a scientist (Eric Whitten) staring at some sort of pulsating tunnel—a particle collider—and experiencing visions of the family’s capture and torture; the project apparently has something to do with time travel.

Cut to Neil Bardo (Jake McLaughlin) in the present day.  He’s trying to repair his relationship with his wife Elena (Arielle Kebbel), from whom he’s separated, and adolescent son Wiley (Carson Minnear).  One aspect of the reconciliation is selling his dirt bike, which is apparently a source of friction; another is trapping an animal that’s wormed its way into the house, a duty that leads Elena to let Neil stay the night.

The next day Neil goes with Garrison Vey (Theo Rossi), his boss in a company specializing in commercial property inspections (and obviously a smiling viper), to the titular site, which he proposes to buy and quickly sell at a profit: surprise, it’s the facility, now trashed and abandoned, with the time tunnel, which somehow still operates when they turn the electricity back on.  Neil connects with it psychically and experiences visions similar to those the scientist did.  The apparitions follow him home, where, against Elena’s wishes, he takes Wiley out for a last ride on his bike.  The haunting visions come on him during the ride, leading to an accident in which the boy suffers a severe eye injury that will require an expensive corneal transplant.

Neil’s desperate to get the money for the operation but continues having horrible hallucinations about the Chinese family and a disaster involving the tunnel-running scientific team, who have apparently suffered some disfiguring accident in the catastrophe.  Searching for answers, he consults Naomi (Miki Ishikawa), a reporter he was once disastrously involved with (perhaps having encouraged her to have an abortion); after she visits the site with him, she begins experiencing the visions too—and when they join forces to find out what’s happening, her husband (Vince Foster) is enraged to find them together.  But since the seizures are getting worse, they continue investigating, even as womanizer Garrison, fearful that Neil will undercut his big sale by raising questions about the suitability of the site as the proposed location of a new school, foments trouble between Neil and Elena.  But he inexplicably begins to see the visions of pain and torture as well.

Neil and Naomi’s searches take them to her father (Clyde Kusatsu), whose security clearance allows him to access top secret files; they disclose that the facility was military.  The files also lead them to Nanda (Kavi Raz), a disfigured scientist who was the sole survivor of the disaster that closed the site in 1978; he identifies Neil as some sort of karmic double of Tobin Marris (Whitten), the man who led the research team and sacrificed the safety of his second-in-command, the mother of his unborn child (Neagheen Homaifar), in an effort to complete his time-twisting project.

The various plot threads are all brought together in a finale back at the site, where the ideas of “karmic patterns” and “entangled souls caught in a web of fate” are bandied about, culminating in confrontations between past and present, good and evil actors from 1931, 1978 and 2025.  There’s even a coda featuring the aged Guang relating the story of his family’s survival, even as Wiley as shown to have had his sight restored—how is unclear.

Many profound issues are raised in “Site” (at one point Nanda adds almost offhandedly that the Americans took over the results of biological experimentation done by Unit 731, much as they brought Nazi missile scientists into their space programs), but Perlman is never able to bring them together into a coherent whole; you’re likely to watch the final credit role befuddled and frustrated, with numerous questions unanswered and others never even asked (for example, you might note, for instance, that forty-seven years separate not only 1931 and 1978, but 1978 and 2025; is that meant to be significant?)

There’s also the problem of taste.  Linking the horrors of Unit 731, which actually happened and are repeatedly depicted here in hazy flashbacks, in some karmic way, with made-up stories about two scientists’ tense relationship in 1978 and the domestic troubles of the Bardo family in 2025, as though there were some equivalency among them, is simply unseemly.  (Just imagine if instead of Harbin, Auschwitz had been employed as the plot device.) A semi-apologetic caption at the end, not to mention the coda in which Guang agrees to tell his story to make the world aware of the horrors his family suffered, are not enough to assuage the queasy feeling the picture leaves.

Yet one senses a seriousness, however misguided, behind what Perlman is attempting here, and McLaughlin’s performance is certainly committed in a cast that’s otherwise unremarkable.  The tech crew has done yeoman work on what must have been a modest budget: Eunah Lee’s cinematography and Gabor Norman’s production design have a simple ruggedness, and BVDUB adds an ominous score.

“Site” is ambitious, but sometimes ambition can be overweening.