Movie Review: ‘Behold’ – Grief and How it Sometimes Takes Over.

Grief has a way of rearranging a person from the inside out, and sometimes horror isn’t just about the monster lurking in the dark. Horror can be the things we refuse to face in the silence of grief.

Writer and director Mehran C. Torgoley, attempts to explain this with his latest film ‘Behold‘. This is a story that navigates the uneasy intersection where trauma, faith, and the supernatural all intersect. It doesn’t follow the rhythm of what most people would consider a horror film, and maybe that’s where much of the disconnect around it comes from. But looking at it through a more human lens, there’s something far more haunting happening beneath its skin.

The story follows Rebecca (played by Llana Barron), a woman suffocating in a house that still carries the ghost of her dead son, Zachary. Her marriage to Reverend Peter (played by Bryan Scamman) has been hit since the loss, and she’s holding onto the idea that if she can somehow get him back, everything else that’s broken inside her will fall into place. But isolation has turned her into a shadow of herself as she falls on alcohol to help deal with the depression and the guilt that is quietly eating her soul.

Peter is aware of this and tries his best to keep his distance while supporting her with prayers. But he decides that divorce is what is best for both of them. When he returns to their home with the divorce papers, the narrative shifts its tone from one about an emotional ruin into something that feels more unsettling and perhaps mysterious even. A spiritual presence has inserted itself into the cracks in their marriage and wants more than them splitting up completely.

Strange manifestations happen that appear to not just reveal emptiness that Rebecca feels but also to challenge Peter’s unflinching faith in the scriptures. I believe this is where Mehran C. Torgoley’s intentions for this story really start to show. The supernatural events don’t just feel random, they all seem tied to the lies and the secrets buried beneath their marriage, their faith and how they handled their grief.

As much as there is some creative brilliance here, it takes the audience some effort to endure the film so as to realise this. If you go into those films expecting loud jump scares and gore or something formulaic for the horror genre, you are likely to feel betrayed and disappointed. In several ways, actually, it feels more like a faith-based drama laced with horror elements that don’t quite hit. You can call it a spiritual dread that isn’t the typical supernatural entity inhabiting a home or person. It’s metaphorical in a sense; the spirit represents the chaos that is breaking up a home that is burdened by grief. What they experience feels like a representation of the guilt that’s been festering unchecked.

Actors Llana Barron and Bryan Scamman each do their best to deliver what is expected of them for this film. And even though it is not the best of performances you would see, it also isn’t the worst. There is just about enough there to carry the characters through the circumstance to the end. Llana Barron, for instance, delivers Rebecca with a kind of fragile desperation that works, even when the script doesn’t always give her the sharpest edges to play with. She wears her grief like a second skin, and there’s something uncomfortably believable about her unravelling. Bryan Scamman, as Peter, takes longer to warm into the role, but his character becomes more compelling when the truth begins to surface.

The fact that most of the film is set in their home doesn’t help much either. The scenes often feel overdragged and not fluid enough to keep you engaged and expectant. The art direction also feels very basic, but that is saved a bit by the practical and special effects.

One of the film’s quiet strengths is that the monster isn’t treated as a central character so much as a mirror. Whether you choose to interpret it as Lucifer, a demon, or a psychological projection, it almost becomes irrelevant. What matters is that it is born out of them. The house becomes a pressure chamber of guilt, resentment, and spiritual dissonance, and the presence feeds on exactly that

Is it a perfect film? No, it is far from that. There were moments where I wanted it to either commit more boldly to fear or lean further into psychological dissection. But there’s a sincerity in its ambition that I can’t dismiss. For these reasons, I will score it 5/10.