| Filmed on location in New Milford, Connecticut, Candlewood is supposed to about the real urban legends which haunt Candlewood Lake. It’s a human-made lake from the 1920s which included flooding over a town. With that type of backstory, the urban legends and ghost stories that exist are unsurprisingly endless, most of which would make for a fascinating horror movie. But Candlewood isn’t really about any of those urban legends, it’s just about an unlikable family that goes insane. | | 2025
Directed by: Myke Fuhrman
Screenplay by: Veronica Flores-Argue, Joseph Patrick Conroy
Starring: Joel Bryant, Lisann Valentin, Isabel Lysiak, Coulter Ibanez
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Husband and wife, Kevin and Veronica, have moved from New York City to this small hamlet in Connecticut with their kids/step-kids – Kevin has a teenage daughter named Sarah and Veronica has a younger son Matteo. Family of four moving from the city to a small back-woods town is a very common set-up for horror movies, and will remain a common set-up, because it works. Or, rather, it usually works. Candlewood has some issues with it.
They have bought this house sight unseen from a very weird real estate agent. Why? Who knows. Kevin says things like it’d be nice to get out of the city, and there are vague references to Veronica having mental issues, but none of which suggest you have to get out of the city immediately buying a house you’ve never stepped foot in before. It’s also implied that they’re rich, Kevin was some wealthy wall street guy, but nothing about that is further explained. If he’s rich, just buy a second vacation home. There are definitely some things missing from the set-up, and at a brisk 80 minutes, they could have found the time.
However, the worst part about this set-up is how deeply unlikable this family is. I don’t think they’re supposed to be; the few townspeople we meet are all decidedly weird and off-kilter, this family should be the audience’s touchpoint to sanity but things go off too early. To start, Veronica is downright awful to Sarah – she taunts her as they go for a jog and then starts screaming at her husband about how she’s in a competition with his daughter. Sarah, somewhat understandably is mean and cold towards her younger step-brother. All of them fall victim to paranoia and psychoses. If they were more relatable people, some sympathy might have helped make this movie a better watch.
It’s creepy all right. A perfect horror-movie score, and lots of quick-edited shots with blurry people and random things, the film just can’t settle down and fails to make use of its great setting.
Candlewood is a mix of so many horror genres – psychological thriller, supernatural thriller, slasher horror, and with such a short run time it’s hard to build a coherent story out of that. Seeing quick flashes of things, the out-of-body experiences, and the hallucinations all start early, and with such an unlikable family at the center, they turn on each other instead of trying to figure out what’s going on. Although the ending reveal with what is going on, just makes an already unlikable film worse.
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