Some call them doppelgängers, others call them evil twins, and a few call them changelings, but in director J.C. Doler’s The Fetch these beings are “The Fetch.” Written by Doler and Paul Petersen from a story by Doler, Petersen, Taylor Bracewell, and Chris Alan Evans, this eerie psychological horror opens with a boy running into a bedroom screaming with a baseball bat. Horrible things happen and the boy grows to be a man named Nicholas (Logan Donovan). Nicholas is a painter who looks after his 4-year-old son Jacob (Tripp Toupal) while his wife Charlie (Aleksa Palladino) works to support them.
However, there is a horrible accident one day that kills the toddler the moment Nicholas isn’t looking. He tries to hang himself and ends up in a mental hospital. Upon release, Charlie drops him back off at the house but lets him know she won’t be joining him. Instead of seeing his wife every day as expected, he only gets to see the case worker, Beaumont (Robert Longstreet), on his unwelcome intrusions.
“…there is a horrible accident one day that kills the toddler…”
Nicholas tries to put himself back into his painting but soon starts seeing things. Strange things. Strangest of all is the figure glaring at him in the dark that looks just like Nicholas. Just like the story his grandmother used to read him, where a man who sees his double, a demon called a Fetch, is about to die.
There are many things The Fetch gets right. It has a great opening, dropping us into a serious piece of action right away. This is how you open a movie properly instead of having the leads wake up in the morning. It also has some high-powered murkiness working in the spooky production design by Reece Roark. You would never believe there are so many hues of sickly green, all of which amp up the horror. Doler also scores by paying high homage to a horror classic while further developing the elements being alluded to. The classic in this case is Evil Dead 2, with that movie’s doppelgänger themes being paid tribute to. This is a treat as Doler gives us a much grimmer take on the evil twin, as the Raimi source plays on the comedy side.
"…looks great and delivers some scares..."
