Cara (2024) Review

Cara (2024) premiered on Sunday, August 25th at Pigeon Shine FrightFest in a sold-out screening. Directed by Hayden Hewitt, a co-founder of the infamous shock site LiveLeak, the 96-minute film is bleak to the point of unease. It is a harrowing exploration of the painful depths of the human experience.

Elle O’Hara portrays Cara, a woman attempting to recover from a history of childhood sexual abuse and the resulting scars left on her psyche. She is a sex worker who streams on a red-room fetish site to a small group of fans. The sexual content in the film weaves from reluctant sex work to abuse in a matter of seconds and it’s enough to make one queasy without veering into full exploitation. Here is a woman who is deeply struggling to function despite her trauma on top of the normal experience of womanhood which is already trodden with its own hardships. O’Hara’s ability to maintain this shaky, on-edge personality and Cara’s unique relationships with each character is a wonder to watch.

As Cara’s story presses on, it becomes clear that she is more like an unreliable narrator and may have more sinister motivations. Her intrusive thoughts are marked by a stark change in color grading which was a beautiful and immersive choice. In these spells, Cara’s self-degradation, doubt, and suicidal ideation are delivered to her by other characters which hits a sharp nerve for anyone who has experienced similar mental lows. O’Hara’s performance gets under your skin as Cara descends into her delusions and eventually accepts her madness.

Joining Cara on her downward spiral is John, played by Johnny Vivash (Isacc 2023), a dutiful, supportive partner who is a few steps ahead of Cara in embodying his own mania. Vivash is keenly talented in playing characters who are teetering on the edge of a full-blown breakdown. With John, he is like a pot of water about to boil over, and when he does, it is terrifying.  Ironically, this is seemingly the healthiest relationship Cara has throughout the film next to her housemate Ashley (Michaela Longden). Together, Cara and John coordinate Cara’s escape from mental health treatment and the evils of her past.

The final act has a poetic fake-out of popular genre tropes that work so well with the design of Cara’s internal struggles seen earlier in the film. It began to feel a little too unhinged and unorganized to fit the bill of revenge horror and the ending helped it land firmly into the psychological horror category. This is not a grandiose, perfectly orchestrated revenge plot that many modern female-led horror films depict. It is an unrelenting, morally messy, violent display of human tragedy.

This film is respectably neutral in its presentation of major societal issues like misogyny, addiction, mental health, violence, and the general cruelty people so freely dole out to others. The one strong criticism in the film was of mental health care and the lack of empathy and compassion often found in the profession. The “ticking of boxes” approach to care seen in the film came across as somewhat comical and highlighted Cara’s far-gone condition. Even so, these moments did not lead to strong ideas of it being wrong or right. This bleak feeling of “it is what it is” carried through the entire story. It felt as if the audience was meant to witness the causes and effects of these issues through Cara’s story rather than come away with an overarching message. This can make it a challenging watch when you consider how uncomfortable some scenes were. Still, Hewitt did a fantastic job avoiding a droning observational tone by including horror hallmarks like well-crafted special effects and chilling performances.

Cara will receive its digital release on 3 February 2025 courtesy of Reel 2 Reel Films.

Movie Rating:

Cara trailer