Mind Body Spirit (2023) Review

We’ve seen Zoom call horror (Host), and live-stream horror (Deadstream), and now Welcome Villain Films brings us ‘wellness influencer horror’. This realm of online content can easily veer into the uncanny with its commodification of health and self-care through ultra-positive ambassadors. Mind Body Spirit explores the pitfalls of this lucrative corner of the internet while telling the haunting story of a woman trying to break into the industry.

Anya (Sarah J. Bartholomew) is a woman who is lost and on a journey to find herself through the online wellness community. She is able to embark on this venture by inheriting her estranged grandmother’s house which becomes her filming space. The film is shot like a found footage movie as she switches between her “on-screen” yogi persona and the woman struggling to find meaning in what she is doing. Bartholomew does a fantastic job in this practically one-woman show. Her online yogi tone and cadence are just as on point as her woman on the brink of madness dealing with vengeful ancestors.

As Anya explores her grandmother’s hidden inheritance, a journal, and tools to perform an ancient Slavic ritual, strange things begin to happen around the house. The beginning of the film is quite short with a jarring, and somewhat lazy, breakthrough to the spooky stuff. It was great to get to the main events quickly but it was a cliche way to get there. The short runtime of the film was welcome but that seemed to put limits on the pacing of the plot, making it feel rushed at times.

There are also some common found footage gripes in this like the everlasting camera battery and at times it was hard to tell if we were still looking through the camera or from a different point of view altogether. It was fun to see add breaks and buffering as a way to remind the audience that this was a found vlog uploaded to some LiveLeak lookalike website. However, that does not make up for the mismatched tropes worked into this short runtime.

The ritual and family lore are interesting; writers Alex Henes, Matthew Merenda, and Topher Hendricks obviously poured a lot of effort into them but other aspects of the film felt neglected. Some scenes had such beautiful compositions while others felt like they were included just to fulfill a horror movie quota. Anya is an all-around undefined person, unsure of basically everything except her journey to “find herself” and her grandmother’s dark legacy. The tragedy of her never gaining her own strength feels even worse because the end goal of her grandmother is never revealed. Like Anya, it feels as though this movie doesn’t know what it wants to be. It has sprinkles of many popular subgenres like found footage, folk horror, and body horror but none are used to their full potential making this an unsatisfying watch.

There are some great elements to this film that anyone who’s familiar with internet trends would appreciate, but they are merely ornamental. The special effects by Aldrich Chica helped elevate the quality of the film along with Bartholomew’s impeccable performance. The theme of the film is also one of its saving graces. The idea that the pursuit of wholeness, wellness, and self-discovery can lead down dark paths puts a mirror up to our own usage of social media and motivations for self-improvement. Mind Body Spirit leaves this interesting concept underexplored and obscured by less-than-impressive storytelling. It feels like a rough draft or a setup to a longer story that delves deeper into this phenomenon. It’s a decent take on online culture that has a few scares to keep interest but has the potential for much more.

Movie Rating:

Mind Body Spirit trailer