Pop Skull

(Adam Wingard, 2007)

A young man struggles to cope with rejection, drugs-binge-induced paranoia, and a possible ghostly presence.
Visually, Pop Skull is as overcooked as a 3-hour-boiled egg. It’s a relentlessly superimposed / intercut / colour-filtered / looped / strobed mess. If the question is "how do you turn cheap-looking DV footage into an edgy headfuck?", then unless “edgy headfuck” is somehow synonymous with “mid-80s indie band video” this film does not provide the correct answer.
Amid the mess, there are a few genuinely tense and creepy moments, helped by the soundtrack of drones, noise, feedback, etc, which to some extent succeeds where the visual effects fail.
It’s possible that if the script had restricted the character solely to the confines of his basement lodgings, to undergo a feature-length descent into drug-addled isolation and terror, then the puzzle at the heart of the film (“paranormal presence or paranoid hallucination?”) could have been exploited to full effect. Unfortunately, the puzzle gets resolved in a rather lame and unoriginal fashion about halfway through, rendering the second half of the film ineffective and increasingly tiresome.