Film Review: LEGACY (2010)

Ari Larsen (Kyrie Maezumi) has been in her own personal exile for longer than she can remember before her boat makes it back into the peer of her home town.  She’s not back home one day before her sister calls her asking when she would be home.  It seems that Ari has been hiding away from the world trying to process the fact that her father Rick Larsen (Will Wallace) is an infamous serial killer and she made a good bit of money off of her book about having been forced to take photographs of her father’s victims.  This is the set up for director Stephen Savage’s film Legacy (2010). 

It seems that Ari has been hiding away from the world and her psychiatrist that forced her into her personal exile.  Being back home and at her father’s place has forced her to come to terms with what her father did and how it affected her.  She’s also an alcoholic and suffers from debilitating black outs that can sometimes make her violent when she is threatened.  When people around her start dying in the same manner that her father used to kill people fear that a copycat killer surface as well as the possibility that her father may have resurfaced after disappearing for almost sixteen years.

Written by Bob Hasse and Savage the film is a slow burn that’s an atmospheric character film.  The murders are more of background to the escalating mystery of who is committing the murders and the ambiguity that Ari herself may have something to do with them.  The film is atmospheric and moody and is anchored by decent performances that sell the ambiguous nature of the film.  This is less a horror film and more a thriller but it’s well done and has a few red herrings to keep the story flowing.  You can do worse than this film.