Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		2.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		1.5

The Squad Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 3, 2014

A lot of horror movies, both iconic and, well, not so legendary, have exploited the ambiguity between “real” supernatural phenomena and either a misapprehension of events or downright mental illness coloring someone’s reactions to what’s actually going on. One of the more artful examples in this subgenre would be The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s evocative filming of the William Archibald play (culled from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw). In that film, it’s left tantalizingly unclear whether a rash of otherworldly events, including the potential possession of children by malevolent spirits and in fact thost spirits themselves, is actually happening or simply the byproduct of the fervid, neurotic imagination of a live in nanny and caretaker. There’s a difference, however, between intentional ambiguity and mere indecision, which seems to be what afflicts The Squad, an admittedly moody film that wants to have its supernatural cake but eat it within the context of incipient paranoia, a stand in here for a “rational” explanation for events.

The Squad starts out promisingly enough, with co-writer and director Jaime Osorio Marquez quickly detailing the almost hallucinatory and shell shocked visages of a small counter terrorist unit. In a series of devastating close-ups, it seems like the camera is peering into a bunch of roiling psyches that are suffering from PTSD, albeit where the “P” stands for ‘present’ rather than ‘post’. A grunt named Ponce (Juan Pablo Barragan) seems especially preoccupied, seemingly lost in the memory of some kind of traumatic event involving his squadron.

For the first half hour or so of the film, The Squad is quite a moody, claustrophobic and effective little film, though already it’s evident there may not be any firm idea of exactly what kind of film it’s supposed to be. The men are evidently on a reconnaissance mission high in the mountains of Colombia, where another squadron has ceased communicating with the outside world. It’s feared that they’ve become victims to terrorists, and Ponce and his buddies have been sent in to investigate. The first act of The Squad simply details the ragtag group of individuals and their high altitude plight, without really evoking any traditional horror tropes other than an all encompassing sense of menace and dread.

At around the forty minute mark, all hell starts to break loose when the men discover signs of carnage and then, unexpectedly, a lone survivor—a highly distraught woman (Daniela Catz) who is unable to communicate effectively and who is found bound and chained in a room filled with signs of some atavistic religious rituals such as are found in the world of Santeria. There’s an immediate split in the ranks once the unnamed woman is discovered. Some want her freed and helped, while others are convinced she’s either part of a trap or at least was tied up with religious artifacts around her for a good reason.

At this point The Squad becomes slightly schizophrenic, ping ponging back and forth between perspectives that seem to suggest the men are simply suffering from paranoia or that there actually is something demonic going on. Marquez does a decent enough job providing an unbearably ominous mood, but there’s only so much foreboding portent that can be tolerated before something definitive (or at least tantalizingly ambiguous) needs to happen. The Squad simply takes its slow, deliberate time trying to accrue an increasing sense of terror, but it increasingly comes off as a haphazard “found footage” film, though that’s not part of its intent or stylistic approach.

With a lumbering pace and no clear intent in evidence, The Squad simply plays out as a series of vignettes involving a bunch of obviously troubled soldiers. In the last few moments, the film wants to have both a rational explanation as well as a supernatural “sting”, much like many a film that has gone before. Unfortunately, things have been so chaotically presented that neither option holds much interest. Ironically, the top billed actor in The Squad is Juan David Restrepo. Restrepo shares a surname with a viscerally intense documentary about a squad in an isolated territory trying to come to terms with the horrors of war. It’s a case of truth being not just stranger than fiction, but a lot more interesting to boot.

The Squad Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Squad is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. The most frightening thing about this release may well be not anything that happens on screen, but the quality control process The Squad went through on the way to market. The actual quality of the video will be addressed in a moment, but did no one notice the bizarre (and glaring) digital errors like the one that occurs at circa 12:21? At that moment, for just a second, a soldier's face suddenly morphs and stretches, dissolving into a pixellated mass that is like something out of a Japanese horror film exploiting killer videos. I actually thought it was an intentional moment and that The Squad was lapsing into a quasi-found footage element, but it seems to be some kind of glitch either in the master or something that happened along the way in the authoring process. It's completely odd, in any case.

Aside from anomalies like that, The Squad has a somewhat bleak and unappealing look, with low contrast scenes that are hobbled by having been shot in low, or indeed no, light a lot of the time. Even more brightly lit scenes have been desaturated so that there's little other than gray and brown in evidence in the palette. In decent lighting and in close-ups, detail is very good to excellent (see screenshot 1). There are occasional minor instability issues, but the biggest bugaboo is the alarming digital meltdown like the one described above.

The Squad Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Though perhaps not as noticeable as the issues with video, The Squad's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix has transitory sync issues that may end up annoying audiophiles. The 2.0 mix included does not seem to suffer from them, at least not at the same rate. Both mixes (in the original Spanish) offer excellent fidelity, and the 5.1 mix has a nicely burnished low end that adds to anxiety levels.

The Squad Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind the Scenes of The Squad (480i; 20:00) is a pretty standard EPK, with the exception of the fact that this has been weirdly anamorphically stretched, making it all look a bit surreal.


• Theatrical Trailer (480i; 1:47)

The Squad Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Squad has two fairly interesting ideas—first, a group of isolated, haggard soldiers dealing with increasing bouts of paranoia, and, second, a mysterious woman who may be, for want of a better word, a witch. Unfortunately the film doesn't seem to know exactly what to do with either of these potentially interesting scenarios, and instead squanders opportunities with a really slow pace and an ultimately unsatisfying resolution. Outweighing even the issues inherent in the film are some really odd errors on this release that really should have caught someone's attention somewhere along the way.