Unnamed Footage Festival 2025: ‘The Lost Episode’ offers grim ending to a police ride-along
Nick Wernham’s offering is as grim as they get.
Rating: 3 out of 5.
I admit I was somewhat skeptical of Nick Wernham’s The Lost Episode. The premise briefly reads: “A raw and unsettling look at unaired footage captured during a police ride-along.” Considering the real-world implications, I pushed play with tense hands and a knot in my throat. What transpired over the next 88 minutes surprised me. The footage includes graphic circumstances of a man who attempted suicide, a church cast in disarray, and two delinquents in possession of a stolen chalice and a tabernacle. The images piece together as part of a cop TV reality show. This footage, once shelved for obvious reasons, reveals a dark and sinister underpinning that explodes in the last 20 minutes.
Despite the cameras, it’s an otherwise typical Halloween night for officers Paul Massaro and Terrence Williams. There are pranksters, drunken disorderly conduct, and general mayhem. You know, the usual. In answering various calls, the audience gets a front-row seat to a police ride-along, as though we’re in the cop car, too. Fortunately for us, they’re two of the good guys. They’re simply trying to protect the community from the dangers of the world. But as the evening hours fall into the next, a darkness seeps into the urgent police visits; every one serving as a piece of a greater, more diabolical puzzle.
Something evil is at work in the town, and it’s up to Massaro and Williams to figure out exactly what. They don’t necessarily pick up on the secret right away – the missing chalice and tabernacle should have bee a tipping point, but alas. Upon staking out a residence, where a mysterious car is parked, they follow it down the block and into the town’s rural fringes. The sticky satanic web they stumble into next, they could never have predicted in a million years.
Wernham calculates the story with precision. Each ride-along stop progressively grows more unsettling. Fleeting, grotesque images feed the viewer’s desire to know exactly what’s happening. But you know what they say: curiosity killed the cat. A series of events eventually boil over into jolt after skin-peeling jolt. The build-up leads to one helluva payoff, as a secluded residence becomes the location for the bloodcurdling climax. It’s never what you expect and never what you want. It’s something more. Wernham refreshingly upends expectations by the last few minutes, so much so that what you see will rattle you to the bone.
It’s the getting there that’s a slow burn. But if you stay put and allow the story to play out, it’s well worth the price of admission. The actors portraying Massaro and Williams authentically ground their characters in well-supplied backstories to offer motivations, intents, and drives. Without ’em, there would not nearly be enough meat on the bone. As such, The Lost Episode arrives as a sad, grim, and devastating entry in this year’s Unnamed Footage Festival.
