Going back to your childhood home is an odd experience. It feels almost like you’re haunting your own home ― you become a child again, reliving memories you hadn’t thought about for years. LandLocked channels that feeling. The film, directed by Paul Owens, follows Mason (Mason Owens), who is summoned back to his childhood home after his father (Jeffrey Owens) has passed away. His father promised that a year after he passed, their home would be demolished. Mason returns to retrieve any items left behind by his family, and finds old home videotapes, along with his father’s video camera. As Mason explores the property and uses the camera, he sees past Christmas’ and get-togethers with his family.
The longer Mason stays on the property, the memories and the house itself seem to swallow him up, digesting him and changing him. The house develops an air of feeling like a living thing that he is stuck inside of. The camera is set up like you are peering in on his life, watching him without his knowledge. As he haunts the house, unsettling electronic music adds to a general unease. LandLocked never lets the audience get too comfortable.
No one’s family is perfect, and LandLocked understands this better than most. Throughout the film, Mason’s brothers (Seth Owens and Paul Owens) visit the home as well, and there is an undeniable tension between them. It’s obvious that something happened between them and their father, even though nothing is explicitly said. This, in a way, makes it even easier to insert yourself into Mason’s shoes.
The concept of the film is undeniably creative, and I haven’t seen anything like it before. The family videos used in the movie are real videos from Paul Owens’ childhood, adding to the realism and relatability of it. On the downside, it feels slow until the third act, which takes you by surprise. Many of the shots are long, quiet takes of Mason wandering around the property. This adds to the feeling of isolation and loneliness that is pervasive throughout the film, but at a certain point it feels overdone, and crosses over into being boring.
The third act is great, and feels like a perfect ending to the story, and redeemed it in certain aspects for me. For something with a very limited cast, it does what it set out to do: explore the dangers of living in the past, refusing to move on from things that have caused you pain. Going back and visiting the places and people you knew when you were younger can feel like a stunt in your growth; reversing the changes that occur naturally with age. In that house, Mason feels small, reverting back to the small boy we are shown through the home videotapes, and it instills an odd mix of nostalgia and fear in the viewer.
Memories are stilted, jumbled images that are hard to pull apart from emotions, and the videotapes that are shown in LandLocked demonstrate this very abstract experience surprisingly well. The film is not without its flaws, but it is an overall unique viewing experience and I am grateful to have been able to see it.
