Evidence is a 2013 film from Olatunde Osunsanmi (director of The Fourth Kind and The Cavern) and starring Radha Mitchell, Stephen Moyer, and Harry Lennix that blends elements of a found-footage horror movie and an investigative crime drama. In the aftermath of a massacre at an abandoned desert truck stop, a group of investigators are tasked with examining the footage recovered from the victims' cameras to piece together what happened and discover who is responsible.
Provides Examples Of:
- Abandoned Area: The massacre takes place at an abandoned old truck stop out in the middle of the desert.
- Black Dude Dies First: It's the Asian dude who dies first. The one black character manages to survive for most of the movie.
- Deadly Road Trip: The victims were all on board a bus headed to Las Vegas that crashed in the desert.
- Dramatic Unmask:
- The first time the welding mask comes off, Tyler is underneath. This turns out to have been staged, though.
- The second time the welding mask comes off, it's LeAnn.
- Enhance Button: The investigators perform some impossible enhancements to the often very dark, pixelated or corrupted footage while searching for clues.
- Evidence Scavenger Hunt: Much of the investigators' portions of the film amount to a form of this as they examine the video for clues.
- Final Girl: Rachel has all the makings of this only for her to die, and LeAnn to be the final girl instead. Then it turns out they both survived and are in fact the killers, and the movie has a Final Boy instead.
- Fire-Breathing Weapon: The killer uses a welding torch as their weapon.
- Found Footage: Most of the movie consists of the "recovered video" from the crime scene.
- Framing Device: The scenes with the investigators can come across this way; although they do contribute to the plot and appear scattered throughout the movie, the meat of the film is definitely the found footage elements.
- Gory Discretion Shot: Rachel is set on fire just off camera. This hides the fact that she didn't really die.
- Jump Scare: What kind of slasher flick would it be without them?
- Malevolent Masked Men: The killer wears a welding mask.
- Once More, with Clarity: The investigators play the footage once more after it's revealed to have been doctored, showing Rachel and LeAnn setting up the massacre.
- The Reveal: The supposedly raw footage the investigators are watching has actually already been edited by the killer - or, in fact, killers. The two surviving young women had switched back and forth in the "role," planted evidence and shot and cut their video deceptively to throw off the investigation and get away with murder.
- Rewind, Replay, Repeat: The investigators do this to examine certain bits of footage more closely.
- Samus Is a Girl: Rachel and LeAnn are the killers.
- Silent Antagonist: The killer never speaks while masked. Understandable, as this would give it away otherwise.
- Slasher Movie: The found-footage segments basically amount to this as the killer picks off the stranded victims.
- Unreliable Narrator: The footage the investigators are using to determine the culprit's identity has been doctored from the start by Rachel and LeAnn.
