Bronson West
So I’m fresh off of seeing Milk & Serial about five minutes ago, and it’s something that I need to write about. Let’s get into it.
Found footage is a tricky sub-genre of horror to get right, but when it’s done right, it’s done right. I think that’s exactly what Milk & Serial manages to do here. Written, Directed, and Edited by Curry Barker and starring Cooper Tomlinson, Adlih Torres, Sterling L. Pope, and Jonnathon Cripple among more, Milk & Serial is an incredibly entertaining, well-paced rollercoaster. Clocking in at just over an hour at 1 hour and 2 minutes long, it knows when to grab you and when to let you go.
Going in, I really only knew this group from their comedy. At the same time, knowing them for their comedy made me even more excited going into this than if I only knew them from horror. Comedians get horror in a way that even some horror-focused filmmakers do, and it has to do with one simple idea: you can have all the setup in the world, but if the payoff doesn’t land, you might as well have nothing.
To be honest with you, I’m not really going to tell you anything about Milk & Serial that would give anything away, but I will say that it centers around friends who own and run a YouTube channel. This will make sense later.
Firstly, the performances were so good that you almost forget that you’re watching a movie and just straight up feel like you’re watching, you guessed it… found footage. Weird, right? The conversations and actions of these characters feel real, unstaged, and reactionary to their surroundings, so much so that they feel improvised. Now, I’m not saying that this whole movie is improv, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a good chunk of it was.
The pacing is also very well done here. It doesn’t feel like any scene overstays its welcome. We get what we need and we move on. There are some lingering shots and scenes, but it’s only to make the found footage part feel more genuine, and I think that they did a really great job of making these shots feel like somebody is actually handling a camera with the intention of just shooting something with no set of skills to do so. It feels very raw and honest, the way the camera moves and reacts to the environment.
It is also a fairly low-budget movie, which actually works in its favor. Too many movies come out claiming to be found footage that have these incredible cameras with stiff movement, but hey, people look at the camera and talk to the person behind it, so it’s found footage! Look, I’m not really a snob about these things, but if you’re making a found footage movie, please use a camera that normal people would use to film their friends and stuff.
Anyway, the budget definitely gives this one more of a visceral feel. Is the camera quality bad? No, it’s actually good, they run a YouTube channel after all. But it’s not too fancy and they really know how to move it in a natural way to come across as genuine found footage or a vlog-style video for YouTube. Many shots have a blurriness and off-ness that work incredibly well to fit the theme and give a more authentic mood to the whole watch.
There are also some genuinely funny moments here. They do comedy, after all. They feel like a real group of friends so the comedy comes from their interactions with each other. Milk (Curry Barker) also has some nose-exhale laugh moments stemming from his character’s commentary on the situation. That’s sort of what’s best about this film to me: everything feels so natural and flows so well. The ideas brought forth in this movie, given the circumstances, are quite clever and creative. The ending was something that I didn’t see coming, and from the looks of the most replayed moment according to the YouTube player, not many others did either.
There really isn’t much more to say about this one without going too deep into it and giving away stuff that I think makes this one special if you don’t know. I urge you to go into this one as blind as possible. I don’t normally care about going into movies blind, but I’m so glad that I went into this one after just only hearing about it via TikTok and not looking into anything about it.
It’s one of the better found footage movies of the last 10-15 years or so. The performances were top-notch, the pacing was great, the characters were believable, and most of all, the found footage part of it all is phenomenal. This is something that you won’t want to skip, it’s well worth your time.
Milk & Serial is out now and you can check it out on YouTube here.
