Dialogue is spaced out and broken up. It seems like a dub over being that the movie is full of a Russian cast, but I could tell by their lips that they were speaking English. I'm very confused.... Also it sounds like Ronda Rousey is doing the voice for the main woman with the mask on...lol. One last thing, did the little girl with the glazed over eyeballs really just yell out... "dang!". I can't stop watching this train wreck. I actually had to pause the movie 3/4 of the way through to give this review thus far. And I really still have no clue as to what in the heck is going on. I swear it sounds like somebody asked AI to make a movie and show some skin.

Or poorly dubbed or AI or something. And the plot is all bad. Like written terribly by brainless people with no idea what a succubus is.

I am also pretty sure this was originally one of those "blue" movies that only adults could rent from the backroom of a video store. Remember them? What with the bad dialogue, atrocious acting, threadbare theme and clothelessness. Then they tried to give it some class by making it a less smutty horror movie.

Except it is VERY irritatingly stupid on every level. There were a couple of effects at the end that seemed okay. And the attire at the one EDM dance party was interesting.

But otherwise this is barely one step below amateur erotica while putting its foot in a steamy pile of dull communist horror.

Of course I had never even heard about this 2024 Russian horror movie "Otrazhenie Tmy" (aka "Succubus") prior to sitting down to watching it. I happened to come across the movie by random chance, and given my love of all things horror, of course I opted to watch it without knowing what I was in for.

The storyline in the movie was rubbish. There was way too much focus on showing off nudity and sexual scenes. Sure, I get that a succubus is a seductress, but it was just laughable here. It felt like the storyline was written by a randy teenager with way too much hormones in his system. So writers Oleg Kurochkin and Dmitriy Zhigalov failed to conjure up a script and storyline that provided much entertainment for me. It was a slow paced and rather pointless narrative.

Given by extremely limited exposure to Russian cinema, then of course I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie. Despite the fact that the storyline was rubbish, then the acting performances were actually fair.

For a horror movie, then "Otrazhenie Tmy" was a swing and a miss, it was unnecessarily sleazed up by the pointless nudity and sex scenes, and it wasn't a particularly scary movie in general.

There were a couple of interesting visual scenes, but it was nowhere enough to make it up for all the shortcomings of the movie.

"Otrazhenie Tmy" came and went without leaving a lasting expression on me, and it is definitely not a movie that I will ever return to watch a second time. Nor is it a horror movie that I would recommend to horror fans.

My rating of director Serik Beyseu's 2024 horror movie lands on a very generous three out of ten stars.