A mute photographer - and serial killer - is trapped in his own house with ghosts and his guilt, but Film Brain has some words about this middling effort.
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00:00A murderer is tormented by his guilt in the horror film The Deserving, directed by S.S.
00:05Aurora.
00:06Venkat Saigunda is a mute photographer, but he's also a serial killer, and he finds
00:11himself trapped in a time warp alongside the ghosts of his victims and his own past.
00:17The decision to make the main character non-verbal is a very peculiar one that the movie doesn't
00:21properly explain.
00:23He speaks throughout the entire film using sign language, but he himself is not deaf.
00:28This actually introduces more problems because it puts far too much weight on the physicality
00:32of his performance, and the dialogue from the other characters is largely exposition
00:36to explain things that he can't say.
00:39The house effectively becomes his prison, and this no-budget movie makes effective use
00:44out of camera and editing tricks to disorientate the audience.
00:47But even at just 74 minutes, this feels like an overstretched short film not helped by
00:52pedestrian scares, as well as the fact that the ending was so obvious I literally guessed
00:57it almost instantly.