Separation is seemingly what happens when someone tries to emulate what A24 is doing in horror, without seemingly getting a single thing right in it.
We follow Jeff, a once famous comic creator, who is now raising his daughter alone after his wife is killed in a hit and run accident. While trying to balance his new job doing art for a dark comic series and fighting his father in law for custody of his daughter, he soon starts to realize his daughter may be dealing with some supernatural entities not too similar from the ones in his books.
What we get here is something that tries to be a slow burning drama centered around loss mixed into some half done supernatural horror that at times felt it was there simply to try to remind everyone they were watching a horror movie. For good measure the final act tries to almost throw everything away to add in a murder angle that you see coming, along with some odd dream world type situations as well.
It doesn’t help either that this film is just filled with plot holes of all sizes. In one scene we watch Jeff change the door knob for a door to the attic, lock it so it won’t open, and walk away as a big plot moment. However in the next scene we see the old door knob is back and no one ever mentions it. With moments like this it just feels like they didn’t double check any of this.
Characters here are so one dimensional too for a film that goes at such a slow pace you’d hope we at least had some depth to it. We are suppose to feel sympathy towards Jeff even though he comes off as a deadbeat almost until he is forced to care. Women in this film either come off as a mean and hateful towards Jeff or obsessed with him as if there is no middle ground.
Overall though Separation just falls flat so much. Even with some decent creature and puppet designs the film just doesn’t know what to do with itself. With a prolonged length that draws out way more than it should, a story that bores itself to death then tries to be everything it can, and just not caring about any of what happens, this is another film to add to director William Brent Bell’s list of bad horror films.
Score :
3/10
