Edinburgh Film Festival: Lovely Molly Review
No matter how hard the actors try, in Lovely Molly the characters are only ever what the script and plot requires them to be until the next ‘Boo!’
by Adam Whyte

rating: 2
If you were most famous for being one of the filmmakers behind The Blair Witch Project, would you really open your film with a woman delivering a terrified speech, in close-up, into a handheld camera she is operating? Would you include a scene where the same character grabs the video camera and runs into the woods? This is precisely what Eduardo Sánchez, writer-director of Lovely Molly, has done here. Sánchez exploded onto the scene in 1999 when he and Daniel Myrick co-wrote and directed Blair Witch, which became a cultural phenomenon and a box office smash (it cost a little over $20,000 to shoot, and took nearly $250 million, and essentially invented the modern trend of viral marketing). The problem with Blair Witch, which I enjoyed, is that its not necessarily a repeatable phenomenon; although it influenced several later found footage films, the studios probably learnt more from its marketing than its content. Since then Sánchez and Myrtle have put out the occasionally low-key, low-budget horror but they seem doomed to be remembered forever as the Blair Witch guys.


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Contributor
Adam Whyte
Contributor
I've been a film geek since childhood, and am yet to find a cure. Not an auteurist, but my favourite directors include Robert Altman, Ernst Lubitsch, Welles, Hitch and Kurosawa. I also love Powell & Pressburger movies, anything with Fred Astaire, Cary Grant or Katherine Hepburn, the space-ballet of 2001, Ealing comedies, subversive genre cinema and that bit in The Producers with the fountain.
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