3 out of 5

Directed by: Dom Rotheroe

We open on a title card that describes the following footage as police evidence; while you can (and probably should) go into Exhibit A cold, anyone who’s seen at least enough movies or shows to understand general structural conventions of a story will understand that this title card tells us: something is going to happen. When such giveaways occur – and “giveaway” is judgmental; presumably most ‘entertainment’ of a non artsy-fartsy variety is structured around something happening, but still – when you get a card like that, and the movie is a found footage entry, and we’re POV’d from a family member who’s just gotten a new camera (Judith, played by Brittany Ashworth), and the footage is pretty much all centered around family drama – not a place, not an event – the something becomes more and more predictable. It’s just a guess as to how supernatural or violent it’s going to be, and then the countdown begins to the first hints at where we’re going to fall along those axes.

Yes, I’ve probably seen too many of these, but once the format somewhat settled between tentpoles like Blair Witch, Rec, and Paranormal Activity, it’s been hard to really throw a curveball. Not that a curveball is necessarily the point, as long as you’re throwing your chosen pitch well.

Which I’d say Exhibit A does: without spoiling its overall trajectory, once you catch the King family patriarch, Andy (Bradley Cole), acting a bit dodgy post a new promotion at work, you’ve already had a couple of puzzle pieces suggesting this is going to be a “destruction of a family” feel-good flick, and that helps to plot out some of the remaining points. I think how effective the remainder is is maybe dependent on how traumatic your own family situation was / is, or how sensitive you are to being in the room when parents argue; regardless, the King family is very real: Ashworth, Cole, Angela Forrest (mother Sheila) and Oliver Lee (brother Joe) and bicker and joke and fight and makeup like adults and kids you know, and the struggles the family goes through while trying to sell their home / buy a new home are painfully recognizable as the little (and then not so little) dings that pile up everyday. Exhibit A’s depiction of this – it’s pitch of us being a fly-on-the-wall for the King’s potential downfall – is excellent: writer / director Dom Rotheroe’s presence is not felt, in a positive way: for the most part, until some inevitably forced why-are-we-filming justifications, this does all come across as home video.

But let’s go back to the predictability, and the effectiveness. In movies where the cards are dealt early (which is, to me, what that title card and the genre of Exhibit A essentially does), there are those where the “problem” happens at the start, and the tension is in wondering how the characters can conceivably deal with it. The Coffee Table is a good example of this, and also a good example of how that can fall apart, when you don’t really have a good answer to the question. Exhibit A is an example of when the tension is intended to be waiting for the shoe to drop, but the movie is almost written so realistically as to spoil that: the shoe drops almost right away. There’s kind of an insulting dodge with what we think the focus of the movie is going to be, and that ultimately harms it: instead of coming across as a clever redirect, it undermines the POV we’ve taken; Rotheroe’s “trick” of Judith talking to others in her family / around her, through the camera, like a diary becomes much less personal feeling due to that redirect – it is more clearly just a story-telling device. And… I’m not sure how much of the story is intended to be hidden from us, but it’s not – those aforementioned hints come way early on – so combined with the constant-shoe-dropping throughout, there is no real tension, again, dependent on how triggered you are by the intra-family arguing.

From the general feedback of the film, though, that is very effective for a fair amount of viewers, and I’m sure the ending hits on some conceptual sensitivities as well that I may not have.

I do enjoy films that are just kinda out to make you feel poopy, but I like them to leave some room for things to think about. Exhibit A is just a document of the poopy stuff. It’s very well made in that regard, and painfully realistically acted, but ultimately pretty predictable, and somewhat of a surface level tale of a tragedy.