Miles Bellar’s The Vessel opens with the introduction of strange phenomena investigator Jim (Michael Breeding) and his man with the camera, Guy (Miles Bellar), checking out the unusual occurrences reported at the home of Jess (Danielle Munday). What starts with bumps in the night soon evolves when a blood-stained record player is unearthed.
Acting as a type of spiritual tuning fork, the appearance of the item also heralds the arrival of woman named K (Aneesha Edwards), claiming she was drawn to the location via dreams, through which she has been receiving messages from a deceased woman named Julia (Payton Shae Taylor). After interpreting the signals sent out from the record player, K leads Jim to where Julia’s spirit seems imprisoned.
Trusting in K’s guidance, the trio of ghost hunters arrive at an ordinary suburban home. After a sickly stranger bids the group admittance to the home, K psychically taps into the deadly mystery of The Vessel, which could spell the annihilation of the entire human race.
Taking its cues from the low-budget staple of the found footage genre and adding an apocalyptic twist, The Vessel may appear as simple verité, but what distinguishes it from the likes of The Blair Witch Project, is that the secret in the story has planetary size consequences, as opposed to merely being concerned with the fate of its protagonists.
“…the secret in the story has planetary size consequences …”
Bellar’s free-wheeling style of filming does, in some ways, mimic other pictures of this type. Still, as his script eventually comes to overshadow the easiness of the storytelling, The Vessel escalates and the characters drop their on-camera personas. Michael Breeding’s Jim has a couple of compelling character interludes, adding authenticity to his performance as a whole. Aneesha Edwards’ K comes off as a kooky oddball at first, but after revealing a life-long affliction that has allowed her to commune with the dead, she becomes the film’s unlikely hero.
There are a handful of moments where one might question why they didn’t just dump the camera and run for their lives. Being shot digitally, as opposed to Blair Witch which cuts between camcorder and 16 mm film, the movie does miss that feel of something that has been randomly recovered after the fact. Despite that, the volume of the implications that aren’t truly realized till after the film’s climax render this a minor quibble.
Where The Vessel lands makes it hard to pigeonhole. Like Cloverfield one comes away with a sense of having just witnessed something impactful that, on one hand, could be dismissed as ghost-hunting lunacy, but from another angle the revelations, if true, could be just the tip of iceberg.
"…gives found footage an apocalyptic twist"
