Strange Harvest (2025)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Stuart Ortiz makes his solo directorial debut with Strange Harvest, a mockumentary with some nasty fun surprises up its sleeves. Its sort of anti-X-files approach to crime features two detectives in the area around San Bernardino chasing down a serial killer known as Mr. Shiny. Well, chasing him down is a stretch; they're really cleaning up after him. For over a dozen years, Mr. Shiny has gotten away with horrific, vicious murders that haven't been linked despite somewhat ritualistic evidence at the crime scenes. Specifically, dismemberment and missing organs.

Taking as its hook our cultural obsession with macabre murder sprees in true crime procedural fashion, this low-budget affair smacks at times of authenticity. Not because it's so polished but precisely the opposite. Frankly, at times it feels like an amateur's work, or a film student's. Witnesses sometimes look like they've prepared their lines. The camera is propped at too conversational a level, with curious voids in the background instead of a wall or curtain. And this is all to the film's credit; much like in The Blair Witch Project, you can't help but get sucked in by the unpretentiousness of it all. This is going to be a gruesome little murdery story, so tuck yourself in and get cozy, yanno?

Which is when the film smartly takes a couple left turns. I was not prepared for the postmortem scenes, but they are shown in all their gory glory. This is clearly where the film's budget went: reminiscent of Saw or Se7en or the Hannibal series, we're forced into grisly scenes of torture and death with only the bloody residue to indicate how this atrocity happened. Oddly, there is one indication of a dead dog, which is censored, but the multiple murdered children are laid bare and plain for us to see. There's more than a whiff of Sinister here, and I had to avert my eyes at times. I was a little glad for this, because the film's general air often had me forgetting this was fictional, and not some true crime doc on a streaming service. In fact, I was most reminded of the nature of Strange Harvest -- it's a horror film, through and through -- in those nightmarish scenes when, via security cam footage or the like, we see Mr. Shiny in action. 

There's also more than a whiff of Lovecraft about the proceedings, and without spoiling too much, it's fair to say this is basically a Lovecraftian story. Mr. Shiny's suggested liaison with an eldritch evil gives the film its title, meant to account for a profane ritual involving human sacrifices. Whether or not you believe is up to you, in true fashion of the writer, but the film works regardless in its perverse sense of pop culture intertextuality. It belongs among the ranks of those I've already mentioned, of course, but also Lake Mungo, Resolution and The Endless, and Zodiac. There's a suggestion of The Exorcist, specifically when the suspect tours through Europe and the middle east. Ideas of the Manson killings and the Night Stalker swirled through my mind too. By the film's end, we still don't have all the answers we might want, but this film works by not giving us any more answers. 

Oh, and pay attention to the title song as the credits roll. It's a damn fine vibe.