Lenore did something that no other horror movie has done to me in a long time.

It made me jump.

Yeah.

I was surprised as well.

I can’t tell you what happened or where in the film it occurred, because doing that would completely fucking ruin it, but for the first time in a very, very long time, I nearly broke out of my skin and clung to the ceiling like a cat.

Not a little twitch.

Not one of those moments where you suddenly realise you’ve been holding your breath because the film has gone quiet.

I fucking jumped.

It surprised me. And the fact that it surprised me is probably the biggest compliment I can give Lenore, because I’ve reached the point where horror films rarely get me anymore. I’ve seen too many of them. I know the tricks. I know when something is going to appear in the background. I know when the music is going to drop out. I know that if someone walks slowly towards a dark doorway while the camera lingers on it for fifteen seconds, there is probably something fucking horrible waiting behind it.

Lenore still got me.

And it wasn’t the only thing about the film that caught me off guard.

It’s difficult to talk about this one without wandering straight into spoiler territory, because quite a lot of what makes it work comes from discovering things alongside Max rather than having someone explain them to you.

So this is going to be one of those reviews where I’m basically waving my hands around and saying, “Trust me, there’s some weird shit going on in here.”

The setup sounds fairly familiar on paper.

Max Wren is a shut-in and unemployed filmmaker living in a squalid basement, spending his time obsessively cataloguing and editing footage of Lenore, a controversial online personality who has disappeared. He’s been gathering her videos and putting them together into something approaching a tribute, becoming increasingly consumed by the woman and the strange online world surrounding her. There’s a very modern kind of horror buried in that idea.

We’re used to talking about haunted houses, cursed videotapes and evil spirits, but the internet has created its own version of obsession. People can become fixated on someone they’ve never met. They can watch every video, learn every detail of their life, convince themselves they understand them and eventually start confusing access with intimacy.

You don’t need to be standing in a graveyard at midnight for that to become creepy. Sometimes you just need a computer and too much fucking time, and Lenore understands that.

The film takes that idea and then locks us in the basement with Max.

For most of the running time, there is nowhere to escape to. We’re surrounded by computer screens, editing equipment, footage, darkness and the increasingly uncomfortable feeling that Max isn’t alone down there. It’s an incredibly claustrophobic film.

But what I really liked is that the claustrophobia doesn’t come purely from the location. It comes from the way the film slowly removes any sense of safety.

At first, Max’s basement is just a miserable place where a miserable bloke spends his miserable days. Then things start happening.

Visitors arrive. The outside world begins pushing its way in. His past starts catching up with him. And somewhere in all of this, something begins to feel fundamentally wrong.

There’s a presence around the editing suite that doesn’t feel like it should be there, and the more Max digs into Lenore’s footage, the more the distinction between watching something and actually experiencing it starts to disappear.

That is where Lenore really gets under the skin.

The footage isn’t just there to give us information. It becomes part of the horror. We’re watching Max watching Lenore. Max is watching footage of Lenore. We’re watching footage within the footage.

We’re watching someone who has spent so long staring at another person’s life that he’s effectively disappeared into it himself. That’s where the film starts fucking with that relationship between the viewer, the screen and what’s happening on the other side of it.

That’s clever horror. Not because it’s doing anything particularly complicated, but because it understands that a computer screen can be just as unsettling as a dark corridor if you know how to use it.

There are moments where you’re staring at a screen along with Max and you start wondering whether you’re actually supposed to be looking for something.

Is there something in the footage?

Did something just move?

Was that there before?

Or am I just waiting for the film to scare the shit out of me?

That’s the sort of tension I love in horror. The film isn’t constantly screaming at you to be scared. It lets you sit with the discomfort. Because when it does finally pull the trigger, it fucking works.

That jump I mentioned earlier isn’t impressive because it’s particularly loud or because Lenore suddenly throws a CGI monster at the camera. It’s impressive because the film has earned it.

It has spent enough time making you uncomfortable that when something finally happens, your brain is already halfway to the ceiling. That’s something a lot of modern horror seems to have forgotten.

A jump scare isn’t automatically a cheap trick. A badly placed jump scare is.

If you’ve spent ninety minutes making me feel absolutely nothing before throwing something at the screen, I’m probably going to roll my eyes.

If you’ve spent the previous hour quietly tightening the screws until I’m sitting there thinking, “Something is fucking wrong here,” then you can make me jump out of my chair and I’ll happily give you the points.

Lenore understands the difference.

It also benefits enormously from its scale.

This doesn’t feel like a film desperately trying to pretend it has a blockbuster budget. It knows exactly what it has available and squeezes the fuck out of it.

A house. A basement. A computer. An editing suite. Some footage. A handful of people. And one increasingly uncomfortable night.

That’s basically all it needs.

There are no armies of monsters. No enormous supernatural set pieces. No CGI apocalypse.

Just atmosphere. Atmosphere, which is something Lenore has in fucking abundance.

The film has a grimy, oppressive quality that makes the basement feel less like a location and more like something Max is trapped inside. The longer he stays down there, the more it feels as though the walls are closing in around him.

It also helps that Max himself is such an uncomfortable person to spend time with.

This isn’t some heroic investigator wandering into a haunted house because he wants to uncover the truth. He’s a bloke who has become completely consumed by someone else’s existence. He’s isolated, unemployed, obsessed and increasingly incapable of separating the life he’s watching from the life he’s actually living. He is also played to absolute perfection by Nicholas Jaquinot.

You don’t need to know every detail of Edgar Allan Poe’s Lenore to understand what the film is playing with. The themes of obsession, loss, death and fixation have been dragged kicking and screaming into the age of webcams, online personalities and digital footprints.

It’s Gothic horror for people who spend too much time staring at screens. Somehow that makes it more uncomfortable than a lot of films that are far more obviously supernatural.

Because this shit feels possible.

Not the malevolent presence, obviously. I’m not saying your laptop is going to develop a murderous personality because you’ve watched too much YouTube.

Although if mine does, it already knows where I live.

What feels real is the obsession. The isolation. The way somebody can disappear online while leaving behind hundreds of hours of themselves. The way another person can spend months or years trying to piece together who they were. The way that obsession can become something much darker.

Lenore takes all of that and wraps it in a grubby little single-location horror film that slowly turns the screws until you’re sitting there wondering what the fuck is going to happen next.

And then, occasionally, it makes you jump like a fucking idiot.

Which brings me back to where I started.

I don’t scare easily anymore.

I’ve watched enough horror to know most of the tricks, and there are very few films that genuinely catch me off guard.

Lenore did.

That’s worth something.

Lenore is available on UK Digital.