Harlan sets up the camera in front of the baby before going down to the basement and activating his makeshift editing center, where a TV set shows live footage His sister (Jana Veldheer) is bloody but alive, crawling on the floor, frantically screaming at Harlan to not hurt her baby, who lies innocently in a crib in an upstairs bedroom. His parents have already been murdered; we see their slashed bodies in various rooms of the house. Through a combination of an omniscient camera and handheld footage, we watch as a teenager named Harlan Diehl (Luke Bonczyk) wanders through his house in the middle of the night holding a camcorder. The story begins in 1994 in what I suspect is somewhere in the Midwest.
I'm not one of them. Some audiences live for this kind of filmmaking. Thematically, there's nothing more or less at work than an excuse for gore, violence, death, and even a moment or two of nudity. Structurally, all one can glean from this film is an idea that was never completely brought to fruition; we muddle our way through scenes that strain mightily to connect to one another via a back story, but somehow the harder it tries, the less sense it ultimately makes.
Perhaps it's precisely because of this mash-up that the film never seems to know what it's about. Playback is a horror film that crams in all the current popular subgenres, namely dead teenagers, technology, demonic possession, and found footage, with just a hint of historical fiction thrown in for good measure.
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