After its premiere at Halloween Frightfest, writer-director Airell Anthony Hayes' pseudo documentary-cum found footage picture gets a digital release from Miracle Media.
Hayley (Rasina Pavlova) has a YouTube channel (which is where the found footage angle comes in) and wrote her university thesis on urban legends. She buys a 'Krampus calendar' online, which turns out to be a Christmas-tree shaped wooden box with 24 doors. Each time you open one it presents you with a challenge. Get to the end and Krampus steals your soul and ensures your body ends up in a messy suicide.
And that's the main problem with ADVENT. It's never adequately explained why Hayley would want to go through the various trials (which range from walking around your Christmas tree three times to staying up all night to sitting naked in front of an open fire - audiences of 'sophisticated' cinema should not get worked up about this, however) just to end up dead and consigned to hell.
It's a very low budget homemade-feeling endeavour with the standout performance being Nicolas Vince who is required to spout a lot of background dialogue and is presented to us as an expert filmed from the same two camera angles over and over, filling us in on information at regular intervals throughout the film. ADVENT is not scary, it's not especially involving and ultimately it's not worth its admittedly brief (77 minutes) running time. Here's the trailer:
Advent will be released on UK Digital (iTunes, Amazon, Google Play) by Miracle Media on 25th November 2024