The Veil when it starts looks like it’s going to an homage to 1970’s cults, kind of like the television show Aquarius or the movie Helter Skelter, with a Charles Manson inspired cult leader urging his followers to accept eternal life with him on the other side. After the opening, the movie shifts to the modern day and we get a much different feel, one more like a Blair Witch style ghost investigation movie, with a surprisingly big name cast including Jessica Alba and Lily Rabe.

Jessica Alba plays a documentary film maker who has convinced the only living survivor of a mass cult suicide, Lily Rabe, to return to the Heaven’s Veil cult site twenty-five years later. The reason for this is to track down cameras that Alba’s character believes filmed the entire event, but were never recovered. The movie opens with scenes from the 1978 mass suicide and continue to jump back and forth between the present and the actions of the cult leader in the 1970’s.

It turns out that the filming team isn’t just interested in Sarah’s, Rabe’s character, connection to the cult, but Maggie, Alba, and her editor brother are trying to understand why their father, who led the FBI to the cult on the day of the mass suicide, was so changed by it. Things get a bit crazy with Sarah having visions and weird things happening with the cameras. Not only that, but the crew winds up stranded when the van mysteriously disappears when a member of the team vanishes.

As they search the grounds the team finds the filming room, which is full of cameras, film, and projection equipment. Instead of calling the authorities the group decides to figure out what’s on the tapes themselves. The first one they find is a recording of one woman who apparently survived and escaped the FBI, but what her video shows is something far more frightening than just her death. Even when the team decides to try and make their way to civilization to report what they’ve found to the police, they are stuck for one more night at The Veil. Sarah feels like the answers are there and that they’ve all been drawn here for a reason beyond just the documentary.

I was expecting a straightforward haunted location movie, but this movie was so much more complex than that. I couldn’t figure out what was happening until the film crew started delving deeper into the recordings that the cult had been making of their experiments. I definitely think you should check out this movie, it’s really interesting to watch and the cult flashbacks really add of depth to the characters.

Seen The Veil or thinking about checking it out? Share your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter, @thenerdygirlexp. You can also tweet at me, @kleffnotes, and find me on my blog, kleffnotes.wordpress.com, and on my kleffnotes YouTube channel.