My thoughts on this film are short and not-so-sweet; it’s just bland. In my opinion, there would have been much more interesting discourse for this film had they ended the film ten minutes earlier. The film is clearly inspired directly by The Blair Witch Project, which is even directly mentioned in the film. It’s an attempt to make a modern take on the concept without changing or adding anything to make it interesting.

Side rant – The Blair Witch Project is not a good film. It doesn’t age well, isn’t interesting to watch today, and doesn’t inspire the same cult following as other low-budget horror staples such as Saw and Paranormal Activity. However, it’s obviously an incredibly influential and important film, and inspired thousands of films that came after it, including both aforementioned films. I have massive respect for the film and, as an enjoyer of the found-footage genre, am thankful it was made. It fit the time perfectly and I’m sure it was a much better watch when it was released, and it showed you didn’t need fancy equipment to successfully tell your story. It wouldn’t hold audiences today, mostly because of developments in technology and the obvious cliché factor (although it feels wrong to call one of the originals cliché itself).

Back to Hunting Matthew Nichols:

The film spends 75 minutes establishing almost nothing and giving you zero reasons to care about the characters or respect their intelligence. About ten minutes from the end of the film, the characters are at the location of a demolished haunted cabin and perform a ritual, to which nothing happens. The main character has an epiphany where she accepts her brother’s death and that she’s been chasing an answer where there is none. Hunting Matthew Nichols would have stuck the landing and justified the 90-minute runtime if it just… ended. It sounds strange to desire LESS to happen, but by letting everything be a hoax and having the demonic, ghostly entity NOT be real, it would have been a refreshing subversion of the genre always needing to go bigger and have that twist ending. As you can probably guess by my ranting, the characters happen to be at the wrong location, stumble upon the cabin intact, perform the ritual, and are obviously killed by the demonic entities.Had the film ended with no ghosts, no demons, and no payoff for the main character’s incessant need for there to be a conspiracy – which, if she was right, quite obviously would have resulted in her death – I would have found the film to be refreshingly lackluster.

I keep coming back to this notion that we’ve gotten to a point where there MUST be a twist, and at this point it’s more of a twist to not have a twist. Why couldn’t the epiphany and permission to move on with her life not be enough of an ending? Why do main characters, without exception, beg to make stupid decisions knowing the likely outcome? Hunting Matthew Nichols felt like it had a plethora of opportunities to deviate from the recipe yet still chose to serve us plain pasta with no sauce.

★✬✩✩✩ 1.5/5