Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Arkar Soe Oo’s The Last Footage packs every found footage cliché into its 88-minute runtime and fails to generate any level of fear. Many filmmakers believe found footage films are quite easy to make—give your friends a camera and shoot. Easy peasy, right? As we’ve seen with other indie films like House on Eden, just because you have a deep appreciation for the genre doesn’t mean you can cut corners when it comes to the script and casting. The Last Footage eats itself within the first 20 minutes and leads to a trite, exhausting experience for the viewer. There’s little here that’s unique, exciting, or even passable. It’s unfortunate then that the film serves as Myanmar’s first-ever found-footage film.
Aung Khant (Oo) is as socially awkward as they come. He’s the lynchpin of his friend group and offers plenty of goofy anecdotes to keep them preoccupied. When the group plans a trip out to the wilderness, everything that could go wrong does go wrong. It’s the typical found footage set-up, and you fully expect the writer/director to flip conventions or spin a uniquely bizarre tale. But it goes exactly how you anticipate it going. There are no surprises. After the group’s bus breaks down, they finish trekking into the woods on foot and come across a pathway lined with ritualistic altars. That’s the first red flag of many the group ignores. Eventually, they arrive at a small home where they’re greeted by an elder witch, and a misguided spell conjures up a beast of the village.
The Last Footage features far too many characters, most of whom are faceless, and the cast don’t even feel like friends. There’s a severe lack of chemistry, improv skills, or sense of spatial awareness that derail the film before it even gets going. The visual aesthetic is par for the course with woodsy found footage; it crackles and pops, and with a better script, it could have extracted the very fear hanging in every corner of the frame. As it stands, it’s nearly impossible to appreciate the camera work due to the script’s lifeless sequence of events. It’s a patience tester, and one that might cause you to lose faith in modern found footage.
It is commendable, though, that The Last Footage is the first film to be entirely shot with 4K Pro camera glasses. That creative choice gives the actors far more room to play and explore their surroundings. But it doesn’t even come close to making the film worthwhile. It’s merely a technical footnote.
Arkar Soe Oo’s The Last Footage is an admirable effort. Making films isn’t easy. But perhaps Oo could have used several more drafts to fine-tune the story, give it more weight, flesh out the characters, and figure out a better way to set up the bloody chaos. Maybe next time.
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