Beyond Fest 2026 Review: ‘Erie’ Finds Its Footing in Found Footage Before Losing Its Way
Erie understands something that plenty of modern found-footage movies tend to forget: sometimes the format works best when it looks like something you could have accidentally discovered online.
Screening at Beyond Fest 2026, Erie follows siblings Stella and Oscar as they return to their hometown and begin investigating a series of mysterious suicides connected to the area. Their search quickly brings them into contact with increasingly strange phenomena, unsettling local stories and enough dead animals to suggest that whatever is happening around them isn’t going to have a simple explanation.
The film leans heavily into many of the tropes associated with early independent found footage, but that’s not necessarily a problem. In fact, those familiar qualities are where Erie is often at its strongest.
Carly Stewart, who plays Stella Scott, and Grant Carter as Oscar establish a believable sibling chemistry that helps sell the movie’s homemade quality. Their interactions give portions of Erie the feeling of watching someone’s personal footage rather than a traditionally staged horror production. At its best, it resembles the kind of strange video series you might stumble across on YouTube and gradually become invested in before realizing just how deep the story goes.
That approach also gives the central mystery room to develop. Stella and Oscar aren’t simply moving between predetermined scares. For much of the film, we’re investigating alongside them, trying to understand what happened in this community and why the land appears to maintain such a powerful hold over the people connected to it.
There are shades of the folklore surrounding locations associated with unexplained deaths and suicides, including stories that have developed around similar places in Japan. Erie taps into that unsettling idea of a location accumulating its own mythology, with the history of what happened there becoming almost as important as whatever may actually be lurking within it.
The film’s standout, however, is Ryan Garcia as Red.
Red’s arrival strengthens exactly what works about Erie. He’s funny, strange and memorable without feeling like he’s wandered in from a completely different movie. He also makes certain that everyone understands there is, in fact, a difference between a hatchet and an axe.
More importantly, his presence reinforces the rough-edged independent personality established by the film’s opening stretch. His appearances provide welcome injections of energy while Stella and Oscar continue digging into the mystery, helping the movie maintain momentum without abandoning the low-fi atmosphere that made it interesting in the first place.
Unfortunately, Erie eventually does abandon some of that atmosphere.
A major stylistic decision later in the film changes the way the story is presented, and that shift becomes the dividing line for the entire experience. Without spoiling what happens, the movie moves away from some of the raw found-footage qualities that had been working in its favor and begins reaching for something noticeably more polished.
The filmmaking may become technically cleaner, but Erie loses something in the transition.
The earlier material feels immediate precisely because it isn’t polished. There is an intimacy to Stella and Oscar’s footage that makes the mystery feel plausible within the language of found footage. Once the movie starts moving in another direction, that illusion begins to break.
It’s difficult not to wonder whether the filmmakers simply wanted an opportunity to expand beyond the limitations of the format. Whatever the motivation, the change doesn’t improve the movie. Instead, it disrupts an identity that Erie had already successfully established.
That becomes particularly damaging as the film approaches its conclusion. What begins as an engaging independent mystery ultimately arrives at a final stretch that feels much less distinctive than what came before it, placing Erie alongside a long list of found-footage movies that create intriguing questions but struggle to land their answers.
For dedicated found-footage fans, that final chapter will probably determine the entire experience.
There is still plenty to appreciate here. Stewart and Carter give the film a convincing sibling dynamic, Garcia nearly steals the movie as Red, and the early commitment to a homemade aesthetic demonstrates how effective traditional found footage can remain when filmmakers trust the limitations of the format.
That’s what makes the later shift so frustrating. Erie already had something that worked.
For much of its runtime, it feels like a strange piece of footage someone might actually discover buried online — an increasingly disturbing record of two siblings poking around somewhere they probably shouldn’t. Had the movie remained committed to that identity, the result might have been considerably stronger.
Instead, Erie starts as a promising throwback to independent found footage before changing course at exactly the moment it should have trusted what it had built.
HMU Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Comments