Horror Movie Review: The Hem (2025)

From writer and director Tyler Russell comes The Hem, a found-footage horror starring Rani Alowairdi, Terri Merritt Bennett, Ryan Bijan, and Savannah Rae Collins.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A documentary film crew go to a, supposedly, haunted location and get trapped with an evil spirit. As they attempt to find a way out, they slowly fall victim to the evil within, while discovering the truth behind the spirit and the building they are in.

It’s such a familiar story, it’s almost laughable and The Hem’s only change to the formula is to give us two different perspectives. That of the documentary crew and that of the detectives investigating afterwards. Neither changes up the formula up in the slightest, but does that make it bad film?

No, not really. What makes it a bad film is how many found footage tropes it employs. If you’ve seen any found footage film before, you’ve seen most of what The Hem has to offer.

So, what is the actual story here? A film crew have come to Old Fort Worth in the hope of documenting the mysterious story of the Southside Church, aka the Rose Chapel. Alas, their plans fall apart quickly as no-one really wants to talk about it. Eventually they manage to get some information out of some locals and find a person willing to take them there.

It’s a huge building, run down and on the verge of collapse. The crew are eager to get inside, hoping to find out more about the fire that the sinister seamstress is said to have caused. Which their guide agrees to let them do, provided they leave before it is dark. You don’t want to be inside when it gets dark.

Why? Aren’t you paying attention? There’s evil inside and it comes in nice dress.

The Hem is a pedestrian watch with an unexciting story, uneventful scares, and forgettable characters. Even the initial set up, the story around the church and the mysterious seamstress, isn’t that compelling. Especially as the way the locals act about it comes across in more comical fashion. A combination of poor writing and poor acting.

Once we get to the location, it is suitably interesting looking, until we get inside, where things really start to unravel. Especially as we keep cutting back to a set of detectives as they try to piece the puzzle together. This highlights two issues.

The first being the lack of depth to the main story which means we need to pad it with this stuff and the second being the fact that by doing this, the film lowers the stakes. After all, if we know people survived, why should we care about their peril?

Peril that is often very difficult to see anyway because of the film’s use of found footage and the tropes employed by the style. It’s not the worst example of it, but it’s not far off it too.

At its best, The Hem has some mild moments where atmosphere is created and there’s a slight sense of danger. Alas, these moments are few and wrapped around a whole lot of shrug-inducing nothing. Thankfully, it’s short, but that’s not supposed to be a positive thing.