Afflicted (2013)

Displaying a rare inventiveness and technical facility in this increasingly tired, cliché-ridden format, Afflicted delivers a genuinely suspenseful ride while making you wonder how its more elaborate effects were achieved on its obviously low budget.

Afflicted is an exciting, adept and smartly skillful debut horror film.

While what will happen next is never especially interesting, how it will happen, and from what unusual angle, generates enough excitement to keep things intermittently lively.

A low-budget horror-thriller that’s resourceful enough to wring a few fresh chills from a slender premise and a less-than-novel formal conceit.

The gradual ramping up of both the camera calisthenics and the gore quotient suggests a movie that’s been very deliberately paced, but that doesn’t mean that Afflicted really gets anywhere, except back to the very basics its state-of-the-art presentation is supposed to transcend.