The Axiom

For me it was one of those horror films that when I'm not screaming at the characters about how stupid they are, I'm laughing at how poorly their lines are delivered. It's a creepy premise but even that quickly fades by the time the third act approaches. How many times have you seen a horror film where a character sees/experiences a traumatic supernatural event, and then when the chaos passes, they say nothing happened and go about business as usual? Strangled by a vengeful spirit? Her actual explanation: "I must have just seen a rat." I mean even being assaulted by a human is enough to shake a woman so badly that she'd be visibly distraught for a while, but not this regular American girl, she handles it like a pro who has seen her share of mean stranglings. I'm sick of tropes like this and the old, "let's split up" or "I'll be right back" nonsense that was proven ineffective 20 years ago in satires like Scream. Somewhere buried in this garbage is an original idea, and it doesn't look like it was filmed on a cell phone, so for that I give it a 2.5/10.

I understand the desire to cut small-budget movies a break but a 7.0 rating for this film might be deceptive for someone deciding if they want to commit a couple of hours to it. 'The Axiom' is a decent enough movie but it's inferior in nearly every way to the lower-rated but similar 'The Endless.' The latter film has a better script, better acting (except for Taylor Flowers who's great in this), better cinematography and a more self-assured sense of what kind of movie it is. 'The Axiom' is a combination of cosmic horror and monster movie that has some effective moments mixed in with some barely adequate ones. I'm not saying skip this film, I'm only warning you that it's a bit uneven and not deserving of it's current (early March 2019) 7.0 rating.

This is one of horrors that can't simply be said to deserve bad rating, but can't also deserve good one, because there are out there many better horror movies. What makes this good one is mystery, adventure, surprise, and weirdness. There is spiritual, religious, interesting world and dimensions. It's very good to be immersed into such dimensions because that way I was on the lookout for something that prevented me from being bored. But there is lack of explanation, good intro, real life scenarios like more people, animals, police, buildings, events. Everything somehow happened too quickly, in weird way, without good reason and explanation. There is lack of motive for occurrences and for the whole story.

Sadly there was room for more and I don't think the budget was the problem but quite possibly the execution and the script. It is not a bad movie yet far from something I would recommend to a fellow horror fan because it doesn't quite deliver, mostly lurks around a good premise without hitting the mark.

The Axiom has some ambition to it, it tries to tie as many ends as possible yet some remain sort of loose, not necessarily in a bad way but certainly not what we would expect out of a better production. So for an indie film, I think it did OK, my problem mostly lies in the fact that it managed to show a pretty good idea but failing to deliver as it should.

Thus all in all it comes down to everyone's opinion and nothing more. You wanna take a chance on it, do so. See how it goes down on you. Maybe don't expect much of it tho.

Cheers!

For die hard horror fans this movie will not impress at all. Feels like concept is copied from similar movies and movie gets predictable. Also there not much horror in it. Don't know what's about the rating of the 7 🤔. Still it can be one time watch.