To first associate the film with it’s context, it drives on the very formulaic plot used "Night of the Living Dead" ( George Romero, 1968) to "30 Days of Night" ( David Slade, 2007)
“Combine (1) a mysterious threat that attacks a town, and (2) a group of townspeople who take refuge together, and you have a formula apparently able to generate any number of horror movies” ( Roger Ebbert; 2007)
It was a true experience because of film being well crafted in many aspects: script, camera work, character construction, mice-en-scene.
Perhaps Most interesting aspect of film’s stylistic was shot motion. Camera never seemed to stop, still it wasn’t an irritating type of camera work. Rather it created fluidity. It readjusted itself, the composition of a shot, by repositioning, refocusing to the point of interest , by zooming just slightly .
It feels the camera was imagined to be as a living viewer rather than a tool of reporting films reality. It feels like it made the distance between film’s reality and audience that much smaller, in other words, there was a lot more engagement.
This technique then is very helpful, since reaching for audience’s engagement with fictional plot is that much harder. Perhaps the idea was even further explored in Cloverfield (Matt Reeves;2008) where entire film is meant to look filmed with personal handheld camera.
It was a pleasure to experience the well though film, where no tiny details like shot of a character’s glance, a gesture, road sign, didn’t hold its share of meaning. Or that no CG elements steal any extra time just to be shown off. It feels like all the ends tidied up into a whole.
