Investigation 13

Secondly is the very swift pacing. There is minimal downtime after the introduction to all the major players. Due to other issues, the audience is never on the edge of their seats, but the movie does not have much fat to trim. Ricardo Valdez’s cinematography is good, jumping back and forth between all the formats- traditional third-person camera, found footage style, and animation- without too much trouble.

And that is where the positives end. For starters, the first animated segment comes entirely out of left field. It is jarring and takes the viewer out of the movie entirely. More importantly, is that it is mostly unnecessary. Layla repeats most of the information offered during these 2-D drawn moments during the tour. It would have been much more effective had these being shown during her statements on the record. The style changes would still be there but in a much more organic way.

“There is minimal downtime after the introduction to all the major players.”

Then there is how derivative Investigation 13 feels. This is where the rewriting comes into stark focus. Early on, the students want to prove the existence of spirits and the like to help create a new division of paranormal science classes. This is an intriguing idea. One would presume that they each have their own stories with ghosts, or the supernatural, to believe in this so much. Add on that they are reasonable humans, and their need for documented proof makes so much sense. But aside from being the catalyst at getting these characters into the asylum, not much is made of this concept.

See, once inside and their equipment set up, the movie devolves into every found footage, haunted building cliche imaginable. It is so predictable that it is boring. Will a member of the group hear an unexplained noise, investigate alone, and met an untimely demise? Of course. Will a character set up in one or two brief scenes earlier in the movie become beholden to the law of economy of characters? Regrettable, yes.