It isn’t that Donohue’s a bad actress, just that her present-day scenes, clunking with banal, obvious dialogue, are unconvincing, while breaking mood and pace constantly. The main one is that the film is ‘presented’ by Donna Thompson (Donohue) a student who was covering the 4 July celebrations for the local TV station when the outbreak occurred. It’s a great idea, and it enables Levinson to work on a big canvas without losing the gritty, intimate feel of the found footage film and without Cloverfield’s limitation of having to fit the whole story into a single camera’s POV (not to mention motivating the cameraman to keep on filming despite the events around him). The government covered up the incident, confiscating any digital record of the event, but a Wikileaks-style organisation has now laid hands on it. Waste dumped into the Chesapeake Bay mutated them into lethal, fast-growing flesh eaters whose microscopic larvae entered Claridge’s water supply. The culprits were the charming little creatures known as isopods or sea lice – parasitic crustaceans that eat fish from the inside. Its premise: on 4 July 2009 a gruesome outbreak occurred in the Maryland coastal town of Claridge in which hundreds of people met horrible deaths. The Bay is a mixture of found footage film and mockumentary grounded in reality. It’s an effective, potentially powerful way to add verisimilitude to a story (and get around holes in the budget), as The Blair Witch Project showed so effectively back in 1999, so it’s unsurprising that the last decade and a half has boasted so many of them.
The found footage film is the cinematic equivalent of the abandoned manuscript or the notebook found in a deserted house. Starring: Will Rogers, Kristen Connolly, Kether Donohue, Frank Deal, Stephen Nunken, Christopher Denham, Nansi Aluka.
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