The Harbinger: Something Bad is Happening, But I Just Can't Figure Out Why

The Harbinger, written and directed by Andy Mitton, is an allegorical tale, in the vein of The Babadook. Unlike The Babadook, The Harbinger relies solely on good acting instead of a powerful, visceral adversary and a well written script, to convey a message that is completely lost in translation.

Contagion

The film is set during the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic. Monique (Gabby Beans) lives with her father and brother in a house that they have scrupulously detailed in order to preserve them a safe existence.

Monique receives a phone call from her old friend, Mavis (Emily Davis) who begs Monique to come into the heart of New York City due to a matter she calls “life or death”. Mavis has been experiencing some very frightening and disturbing nightmares while she sleeps, that she cannot seem to awaken herself from.

When Monique arrives, she meets some of the other residents affected by COVID and takes great precautions entering Mavis’s apartment.

Mavis shares that she has been suffering from terrible, nightmarish dreams that are becoming harder and harder to wake up from. She sees and feels a dark presence embodied as a plague doctor and feels that it wants to erase her very existence.

As Mavis has apparently “saved” Monique’s life in the past, Monique feels a duty to stay and support her. The longer Monique stays, she becomes more and more drawn into the nightmarish world and the dark presence begins to pursue her as well.

Will Mavis and Monique get to the bottom of this contagious specter before it wipes them out of existence entirely?

Source: XYZ Films

in all honesty…

The Harbinger proved to be quite a perplexing film.

Though it definitely sets itself up to be an interesting concept, the execution and the script utterly failed. The pace is excruciatingly slow, filled to the brim with long winded exposition and scenes that are utterly useless to the plot.

Monique rushes to Mavis for this “life or death” situation, possibly compromising her family in the process, and when she first arrives, the two of them have time to order food and drinks and have a picnic in the middle of the living room. Deviating from the initial urgency, Monique doesn’t even hear Mavis’s story until well after this. More time than not is wasted with irrelevant filler scenes like this.

The script spends most of its time “telling” rather than “showing”. Most of the information we need is fed through long sections of superfluous exposition. While investigating the monster in their dreams, they consult, Wendy (Laura Heisler), a demonologist . Wendy explains everything that the “demon” is but we never get to see a fully realized monster. It’s just there, clucking and bringing in nightmares, but we don’t really know why.

Source: XYZ Films

The demonologist states that its form and the reason it does things, essentially as “because it can”. But why Mavis? Why is it interested in Monique? Just because she’s there? Why does it even want to do this? What does it get out of it? Is it likened to COVID where it just randomly picks victims? This is usually better conveyed through the actions of a fully realized character, not a demon that just is.

Even cringy, iconic villains such as Freddy Krueger and Jason Vorhees, though many of their plots were downright silly, had a reason and connection to the places and people they killed. A demon who does things “just cause” is boring, and I never found this one truly terrifying.

The stand outs of The Harbinger are the moody cinematography and the eminently focused performance by Gabby Beans. This actor should be a star. No matter how rough the script she had was, she executed a beautifully heart-felt performance, and never wavered. She almost saved it for me.

But the predominantly failed script unfortunately shadowed over a concept that, if developed with more heart and insight, might have turned into a genuinely scary film. It was too blatant to ignore or overlook. Even with a tight budget, creativity and clever, inspired adjustments can help each character bloom in unforgettable ways.

For these reasons, The Harbinger just didn’t work for me. I really wanted to like this film, it just had too many holes, fillers and easy, convenient script cheats to take seriously.