Four college students conduct a social practice during the summer vacation and go to remote villages to shoot documentaries to investigate folk ghost culture. However, as the investigation deepens, strange things happen frequently and they gradually realize that things are much more complicated than they thought.
Capture Ghosts is streaming on Cathayplay
“Capture Ghosts” is a pretty solid short film. Like most found-footage films, the setup here is quite important as the opening introduction about the group getting together for their mission starts off quite nicely. While brief, we get a sense of the personalities of the individuals on the trip and their intent of finding the truth about the mysterious sightings shown in the area. The resulting interviews with the locals documenting their slew of sightings and experiences about ghosts, demons and mysterious supernatural encounters around them completes the setup required for this type of genre movie. These quick interviews are somewhat realistic and grounded experiences that people who live out in the countryside might encounter that would lead them to believe in the supernatural. Not only do they recount personal experiences that are kept to unnatural scenarios or strange sightings but also connect pieces of folklore into the equation as an explanation.
However, this setup also causes the shorts' only real drawback. By focusing on the interview portion with the locals trying to capture their experiences, the first half here can lose the viewer rather easily. Since none of the locals are named or structured together where their encounters are of similar situations, it's easy to get lost in the background of random talking heads spouting stories, as these are also brief snippets of the individuals' experience being related back before cutting to someone else that tells their own story before finally getting back to finish off the first story. With no recreations or reenactments of the situations described, this section can wear out the repetitive nature of these stories into a dull slough since that's all we get to see happening. The finale switches back to the camera crew's encounter with something in the village and brings things back to the found-footage aspect but it's all over so quickly with the fade to black almost immediately after somethings' happened. This quick-stop cut ends up cutting the momentum of the film at a crucial point. Otherwise, there's not much to dislike with “Capture Ghosts.”
Despite the few mild missteps with the second half, there's still quite a lot to enjoy here with this short-form found-footage effort. It's not going to reinvent the genre but serves as a watchable if slightly flawed divergent for the holiday season.
