Having had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2024, the found footage chiller What Happened To Dorothy Bell? directed by Danny Villanueva Jr, explores the healing process of childhood trauma through the set up of an adult granddaughter discovering the truth behind her past involvement with her grandmother.
Opening on a video recording of young Ozzie (played by Arya Washington with the voice of Eva Williams) playing with her father (Michael Hargrove) as a children’s puppet show plays out on the television. The puppets are singing the song “There was an old woman that swallowed a fly”, which foreshadows the film’s set up. Cutting to an adult Ozzie (played by Asya Meadows) who is now in zoom therapy with Dr. Robin Connelly (Lisa Wilcox), viewers learn that as a child, her beloved grandmother who fostered a love of literature in her granddaughter, one day became violent, attacked little Ozzie and eventually hung herself in the local library. Keeping a video diary, Ozzie decides to return to her hometown in order to investigate what exactly happened to her grandmother and whether she can exonerate her from her now famous moniker as the “Witch of Spellbound”.
Whilst dealing with her feelings of betrayal towards her parents for keeping this secret from her, Ozzie investigates the local library with the help of a janitor and seeks to find out whether the spirit of her grandmother haunts its stacks.
Utilising the found footage format the majority of the way through, What Happened To Dorothy Bell is a dread-laden exploration of PTSD manifested from childhood tragedy and through our search for truth in the past, this may open up more wounds than we hope to heal. Asya Meadows plays Ozzie with a sad strength, never resorting to over the top theatrics, but quietly simmers through her haunting journey. The atmospheric dread created within the film is palpable, with a slow, creeping trudge towards a doomed inevitability, littered with scenes reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project (1999).
With a relatively short run-time of only 80 minutes, more time could have been spent on fleshing the story out a little bit more, glimmers of a demonic entity and occult text are introduced but fail to feel intrinsic to the roots of the narration. However, the dynamic use of the found-footage format and the exploration of family secrets and mental health male What Happened To Dorothy Bell an impressive first feature entry for director Danny Villanueva Jr.
3 Screams out of 5
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