Log 15 Review: Sebastian Dove's High-Concept Horror Debut

Meg Moynahan plays Cayley, a woman watching her mother (Jeanne Scurek) slip away into dementia. Refusing to accept the slow erasure, Cayley throws herself into an unorthodox regimen of self-experimentation, documenting everything on camera in the hope of unlocking some dormant capacity of the mind. Her collaborator, Tony (Jeff Ronan), provides a skeptical counterweight, while Dr. Quinn Adler (Stephen R. Miller) hovers at the edges as the authority figure whose theories may or may not be trustworthy.

The hook is that the recordings themselves become an active agent. As Cayley reviews her footage, details shift, timelines contradict, and the woman on screen drifts from the woman holding the camera. Dove builds this out as a slow unraveling rather than a series of jump scares, which is the right instinct. The problem is that the film never establishes a stable baseline for what's "real," so the distortions register as noise rather than violation. When everything can change, nothing feels at stake.

Dove clearly has an eye for texture. The grainy, handheld footage, the dim apartment corridors, the unsettling intimacy of a face lit only by a monitor - these are the tools of a filmmaker who understands that dread lives in the ordinary. Moynahan carries the film with a performance of fraying resolve; her Cayley is sympathetic without being saintly, and the desperation driving her experiments reads as genuine grief rather than plot machinery. Scurek, in a smaller role, brings a quiet dignity to the mother, and the scenes between the two women hint at the emotional horror movie "Log 15" could have been.

Where it stumbles is structure. The film's internal logic is slippery in ways that feel accidental rather than designed. Dove introduces rules - the footage alters reality - then bends them so freely that the audience stops trusting the movie's own premise. A mid-film revelation about Dr. Adler lands with a thud because the film hasn't done the groundwork to make his ambiguity meaningful. And the climax, which should be a payoff, instead feels like the point where the filmmakers ran out of ideas and reached for chaos.

The found-footage format is a double-edged sword here. It heightens immediacy, but it also traps the film in repetition: watch footage, notice something wrong, react, repeat. At 75 minutes, that loop wears thin quickly. There's a version of "Log 15" that leans harder into the psychological - Cayley's terror that she's losing her own mind while trying to save her mother's - and that version would be devastating. This one keeps reaching for that and keeps missing.

Still, there's something admirably stubborn about the whole enterprise. Dove isn't chasing jump scares or franchise potential; he's trying to make a horror film about grief and memory and the fear that the tools we build to save us might destroy us. That ambition deserves respect, even when the execution doesn't.

Pros

• Meg Moynahan's committed, emotionally grounded lead performance
• Effective lo-fi atmosphere and genuinely unsettling visual texture
• A compelling central metaphor linking memory loss to technological self-destruction
• Tight runtime that rarely sags

Cons

• Slippery internal logic drains tension from the reality-bending premise
• Repetitive found-footage structure grows tedious
• Underdeveloped supporting characters, especially Dr. Adler
• A muddled climax that mistakes chaos for resolution

"Log 15" is a frustrating near-miss from a director with evident instincts and a lead actress doing real work. It wants to be a horror film about the terror of forgetting and the danger of remembering too much, and in scattered moments - a flickering frame, a doubled reflection, a mother's blank stare - it almost gets there. But a premise this ambitious needs a tighter script and a firmer grip on its own rules, and Dove's film offers neither. Genre completists and found-footage devotees should give it a look; everyone else can log this one as a curiosity rather than a discovery.