Obvious Fears

Ariel Schulman

CAST: Kathryn Newton,Matt Shively,Aidan Lovekamp,Brady Allen,

Katie Featherston

**1/2

The reason Paranormal Activity continues to be a successful franchise is how well it blends it with the “normal”. Here again,great care is taken to ensure that the story of Katie is carried forward amidst a warm and loving but familiarly distracted family. The scares may be few and far between,and almost laughable in the way movie No 4 brings these to a finale,but the interludes are nicely filled out for us to not complain too much.

A great part of the credit goes to the tweens Alex and boyfriend Ben,played by Kathryn Newton and Matt Shively. They record each moment of their life,on iPhones and webcams,and are in constant touch through video. It is they or more precisely their gadgets that are the watching eyes of Paranormal Activity 4. And it is they who notice that strange things start happening once a withdrawn,lonely neighbourhood child comes to live at their place. His mother has been in some sort of an unexplained accident and Robbie (Allen) has no one else he can live with. Robbie is six,and so is Alex’s younger brother Wyatt (Lovekamp) — same age as the boy who was kidnapped by his murderer aunt Katie at the end of part 3. Both Robbie and Wyatt are also adopted. Plus Robbie’s “mother” is none other than Katie. The film doesn’t fiddle much with the common scary tricks of swinging chandeliers,a kid’s tricycle moving on its own,gadgets that turn on by themselves and children waking up and walking around at night. An Xbox Kinect feature is a saving grace,lending the proceedings an otherworldly hue when the lights have been turned out. But,the film proceeds to even dilute this with an overkill. Still,in an age of multi-million monsters,it’s nice to be left astir by everyday basic innate fears. SL