Review: ‘Fey’ is found footage gold

There are few found footage films that feel as real and raw as writer/director Madeline Doherty’s Fey. The indie feature, clocking in at just 53 minutes, wastes no time getting to the good stuff. The world-building and character development happen in tandem with the chilling scares. You don’t have to wait to be creeped out; Doherty pens a taut, frightening script that immediately begins seeping out of the screen. Who said found footage was dead? The filmmaker proves that there is still plenty to tell in this format and delivers a film that will make you sleep with all the lights on.

The story follows Maddy (Doherty) during a trauma study. As she enters the final phase, something (or someone) lurks in the shadows of her parents’ house, where she’s been living since a particularly traumatic event derailed her life. She hopes this study will unlock her mind and release her from the past. She documents every waking moment and captures some downright cursed images that’ll make your blood run cold. Alice (Zoe Bishop), who’s coordinating the study’s final stage, spends a night after her car breaks down and witnesses the terror for herself. The film trailer (below) doesn’t do it justice — although it is a sufficient taste test. What you experience is truly unholy.

Doherty’s Fey feels like something we shouldn’t be seeing. It’s “raw, unpolished, and so real it barely feels like a movie,” the filmmaker says in a press statement. And she’s not lying. Where many found footage films attempt to be authentic and fail, Fey excels in being a haunted tape that could have actually been discovered on the side of the road. “I shot it in my real childhood home, with my real parents, and even used real home movies,” Doherty adds. That genuine approach cranks the dial up to 11 and creates an atmosphere of such suffocating dread that you won’t be able to breathe. And that’s not hyperbole talking.

As her feature film directorial debut, Fey finds Doherty tosses “it all on the table for the genre,” she says. To give audiences something that feels new but familiar, grounded yet deeply unsettling. Something made for people like me who love horror not just for the scares, but for the stories that stay with you long after the screen goes dark.” Doherty displays a deep love and appreciation for found footage history, from well-placed scares and piping hot pacing to a bone-rattling finale. If you’ve been itching for a found footage flick to actually terrify you, look no further.

Fey hits multiple platforms, including Chilling, Scare Network TV, and Kings of Horror, on November 14.

Check out the trailer below, if you dare.