Life of Belle (2024)

Life of Belle Review

I love seen footage, especially in the horror genre. It is the shakiness of the camera and how audio gets distorted that creates a sense of authenticity which makes it more frightening. The same way, it is interesting how these movies are made with very little money involved. Get together your family and some friends, take your camera or phones, and you can produce your own creepy vision. In LIFE OF BELLE, Shawn Robinson used his friends and family as cast members to depict what happened to the Starnes’s and who was Annabelle Starnes, but with mixed results and an unsatisfying end.

The videos were taken from their home security system (like Paranormal Activity 2) and Belle’s personal camera for her new YouTube channel named Life of Belle. This explains why they got featured at all actually. Bell is an ordinary eight-year-old girl whose YouTube content reflects her age accurately making slime, collecting worms, or trying to keep her younger brother from taking her possessions away from her. However, as she continues capturing scenes something becomes evident that there might be wrong with their mother. Her behavior starts getting crazier when it emerges that either she has become crazy due to supernatural things following them or she is going insane with time passing by after having them attached to themselves. Meanwhile father goes away on business leaving the two little children with their mother; this escalates activity further making her acts more bizarre and disturbing thereby leading to a shocking conclusion regarding what has happened to this family.

In LIFE OF BELLE we get engrossed right from the beginning by its intriguing mystery of a murdered family and a missing child. With real-life family members performing in leading roles, true household dynamics enhance viewers’ sense of foreboding as we impatiently anticipate the events unfolding towards film opening’s outcome only days later. Although actors have not had much experience , most deliver solid performances without slowing down as they go along. The kids are just amazing and they handle intense situations with such maturity that sometimes they slip out of their roles. The movie also has a few cool scares, but most of them are borrowed from other popular movies and still used properly.

The problem with LIFE OF BELLE is that the entire story and ending do not work. The pacing of the movie is a problem with some of its sequences dragging on for too long or not much happening at all. The cliché about a mentally ill parent experiencing supernatural phenomena, being dangerous, and their spouse disbelieving them has got to go as well. Misunderstanding in terms of mental illness is there, but it seems like a lazy way out to have most of the focus be about medication side effects and if the person is “crazy.”

One of these comes from another low budget film called Skinamarink where two very young children are trapped inside their house while evil lurks around them but here the parent can be seen. I am not going to mention anything specific but this ending felt more chaotic and emotionally disturbing than scary because towards the end these kids were just crying and screaming until you get tired listening. Is it shocking? Not much, yet also, this big reveal at the end is rather silly and completely destroys any tension that had been built up in the mind of viewers. I was more frustrated than frightened by that, which was unfortunate.

LIFE OF BELLE is a quite interesting low-budget found footage effort that does not know what to do with its own story. It managed to produce some scares in it, there are some good performances from its cast that’s mostly family oriented ones; nevertheless this film disappoints due to an old question “Mental Illness or something paranormal?” And distressing finally makes life unbearable for viewers rather than enjoyed by them. Our investigation into it started off better than our discovery of it in reality did.

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