Vague Visages’ Dagr review contains minor spoilers. Matthew Butler-Hart’s 2024 movie features Riz Moritz, Ellie Duckles and Tori Butler-Hart. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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Nearly every year across the international film festival circuit, distributors snap up another found footage movie. Some are pulpy, slapstick fun. Some are forgettable re-runs of the same shaky-camera tropes and rely too much on their actors’ ad-libbing talents. However, Matthew Butler-Hart’s Dagr  has a more original premise than most found footage horror movies. The lead characters are two boisterous YouTube pranksters, Thea (Ellie Duckles) and Louise (Riz Moritz). They film adrenaline-fueled pranks targeted at the uber-rich, and they talk a great deal about sticking up two fingers to fat cat capitalists. But it’s clear early in Dagr that Thea and Louise’s criminal acts of vandalism are a thinly veiled grasp for fame.

Dagr has the potential to be a much more original horror flick, but what results is a reasonably predictable take on cliched tropes of the found footage subgenre. The action begins when the pair turn up undercover at a high-end commercial shoot in an isolated Welsh manor house. Thea and Louise plan to pose as caterers and wait for the director (Tori Butler-Hart) to turn her back before they make off with the shoot’s high-end clothes and cameras. Yet unbeknownst to them, the house sits on a consecrated site of an ancient Druid sect dating back to Pagan Britain.

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What makes Dagr stand out, in its better moments, is how it plays with multiple sources of footage to create a movie-within-a-movie narrative. A queasy sense of horror first seeps in when Thea and Louise arrive at the shoot and stumble across some recordings of the crew on set. Eerie events unfold on grainy iPhone and iPad recordings filmed by the commercial director. This footage sparks an ominous sense of panic in Thea and Louise and hints at a close, destructive supernatural presence. Yet, while these overlapping recordings and timelines set the stage for an interesting angle on found footage horror, the script fails to make much of this premise. Even when events take a darker turn, the script meanders through loose, adlibbed dialogue that gives the actors little to work with.

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Part of Dagr’s main issue is that the build-up of tension is somewhat erratic. The 77-minute runtime is pretty standard for a horror movie, but even a short film still has to unleash jump-scares at the right moments. Unfortunately, Dagr does not, with little happening in the way of tension for much of the first third before galloping through a rapid succession of gory moments. The final scenes offer a supposed payoff that is gory and chaotic but still standard for a found footage movie.

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Dagr’s character development is also strong. The energetic cast seemingly had a lot of fun making the movie, and Duckles and Moritz give stand-out performances. Butler-Hart has described Dagr as a cross-over between The Blair Witch Project (1999) and an episode of Absolutely Fabulous (the BBC sitcom focusing on the absurd and selfish lives of two fashion-obsessed women in 1990s London). Duckles and Moritz live up to this description and manage to keep up inane dialogue spontaneously and believably. The vividness of their performances means that their chatter structures the movie. Dagr’s turning point is when the irritating duo realize the danger, and their babbling chatter descends into whimpered squeals and, eventually, high-pitched screams.

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Visually, Dagr’s generic and rainy woodland doesn’t make it stand out from the crowd. However, the movie’s production values are still solid. In particular, the sound design introduces ancient-sounding folk music that makes the most of the rural Welsh location. Although the rural landscape itself doesn’t add anything new to the found footage canon, there are a few moments in the high-octane closing scenes where the sound and music effectively heighten the terror.

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Horror fans will also love Dagr’s joking references to other iconic movies in the found footage subgenre. In one scene, Thea re-enacts segments from Heather Donahue’s iconic close-up monologue in The Blair Witch Project — a pastiche that is clever and will please hardcore horror fans. However, the knowing jokes aren’t enough to fully immerse the audience.

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Dagr isn’t a bad found footage movie, and it has its moments of fun, yet Butler-Hart’s film doesn’t sustain the promise of its opening scenes. It’s hard enough getting any independent horror movie over the line, regardless of the budget or quality, so the cast and crew deserve credit for developing an original premise to draw in social media and streaming content. If you want fun scares, Dagr provides escapist entertainment. But if you want something original, there’s more out there in the found footage subgenre.

Christina Brennan (@bigloudscreams) is a UK-based freelance writer with bylines in Little White Lies, Flux Magazine and Filmhounds. She has a soft spot for all types of horror movies and is currently writing a book on George Sluizer’s thriller The Vanishing (due to be released in 2025).

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