Inside a particularly strange house, the news team discovers a box of video tapes inside a locked closet. Sensing a story, they decide to take them back to their studio. From the tapes, they learn that the family who had lived in the house was not pushed out by the banks, but fled the house in fear for their lives. Trying to decode the story, the crew keeps seeing a faceless figure dressed in a dark suit appear in the footage that causes the videotape to scramble. Their fear mounts when this figure, The Operator as he is deemed, starts to appear in their real lives, standing quietly and always watching them. Tortured and terrorized, the three crew members must track down the mystery of The Operator before it's too late.
As you can guess by the plot summary above, this doesn't continue the Marble Hornets web series (unfortunately) but is a new story with new characters.
Although the film is a decent film, the decent part of the story doesn't really ever get going until too late into the film.
Being a spiritual sequel to the web series, you'd expect them to at least carry on with the lore and canon they established in that. But there are no masked baddies, nothing to do with being sick and taking pills, no real intelligence put into the film.
It's a straight forward story anybody could have made, far from what the original series had in mind.
The creepy presence of The Operator has even been removed thanks to way too many jump scares, and too many "Ooh look at me in your doorway, NOW IN YOUR FACE. No, sorry, IN YOUR CAMERA'S FACE, even when you aren't holding it".
They should have kept him stalking in the background throughout, with only the odd appearance close up.
In all honesty, I'm quite disappointed in the film.
Yeah I know, it's not going to be the same. And I know that the series had a much longer time to build its story and suspense. But the film just comes across as a poor mans copy.
It is, like I said, still a decent film.
Just don't expect anything Marble Hornets, even if it did have a throwback to the series at the end.
I have to give it a
5/10.
It was still a good movie, but I wish it felt more like the web series and continued certain aspects from it.