Island of the Dolls (2023)

Island of the Dolls is “based” on the “true story” (uh-huh) of Adrian (Howard J. Davey), who in the mid-1950s found the drowned body of a little girl named Josie. Adrian buried her, whereupon “he was haunted by her spirit.” Why? Who knows? Maybe he accidentally buried her alive.  

Adrian “attempted to appease [Josie] with the gift of a thousand dolls.” Meanwhile, “the island became a tourist attraction, and the lack of belief in the history of the island weakened [Josie’s] spirit.” That’s kind of contradictory, considering that people come to the island precisely to see the dolls, and taking into account that haunted tourism is driven by true believers.  

Also, since Adrian is the island’s only permanent resident, how much “belief” could Josie’s spirit possibly need? Not to mention that this Clap Your Hands If You Believe bullshit has chicken-or-egg written all over it.  

Anyway, “a trip that was intended to gain closure for Maria [Beatrice Fletcher] and Oliver [Lewis Sycamore] … reopened the door for bloodshed.” Well, Maria is the one who’s trying to get closure (sort of); Oliver thinks they’re there to rekindle their relationship (they do that too, though it’s safe to say that their chemistry-free passion isn’t going to set the world afire). 

When Maria was herself a little girl (for the sake of argument, let’s say 10 years old), her mother took her on a tour of the island guided by none other than Adrian. Now, Adrian looks the same age in Maria’s undated flashback as he does in the prologue, which is set in “1956.” 

Assuming that “Present Day” refers to the year of the Lord 2023 when the movie was released (and there’s no reason to believe it doesn’t), that would make Maria a very spry 77 years old (which Fletcher most certainly is not). What the hell is up with that? 

When Adrian reappears at the end of the film, which takes place in the “present,” he still looks as young as he ever did. Maria isn’t the least bit surprised to find him unchanged, but perhaps she thinks everyone ages as slowly as she does. 

How is this possible? Well, rumor has it that “in 2001, Adrian’s body washed up in the same spot” where he found Josie; maybe what Maria and Oliver find at the end is Adrian’s youthful ghost — which of course doesn’t make it a less shocking discovery, nor does it clarify just how old Maria is supposed to be. 

I get that this is a shoe-string effort (nothing says DIY like shooting in the woods) and a little old-age makeup might have snapped the string (they did afford two different actresses for young Maria and adult Maria, but I suspect the former must have been the director’s niece or something), but a simple line of dialogue could have gone a long way: “Adrian was cursed with agelessness” (or a variation thereof). 

Why not? This is after all a horror flick about a man living on a haunted island, and we approach it already willing to suspend our disbelief. Then again, they could have written a whole new script just tying up loose ends — and, come to think of it, they should have. 

Why does Josie torment Adrian? The only thing he did wrong was give young Maria one of the “thousands” of dolls, and that was after (how long after, though, I haven’t the foggiest) Josie started haunting him.  

And why does Maria blame her mother “for all of this”? And what exactly is “all of this”? If Maria is talking about the events that transpire after she returns to the island, that’s kind of her fault — what with her and Oliver’s trip “reopen[ing] the door for bloodshed” (which implies there was “bloodshed” before, not that we see any of it).  

And what about the dreams? Maria claims she’s been “having dreams about the island. Hearing the voice of a young girl, pleading for her doll back.” These dreams are oft discussed but never seen, which is fine by me because I’m not a fan of dream sequences; what bothers me is that the dreams are presumably Josie’s doing — but wasn’t her spirit “weakened”? 

And so on and so forth. Here’s a movie so starved for content that the opening crawl detailing the island’s backstory is followed by an eight-minute enactment of said backstory.

In an 80-minute movie, that’s 10% of the total runtime as well as roughly the equivalent of eight pages of the screenplay. That’s time that would have been better spent establishing and developing a sound premise — but then, time and its passage are concepts with which the filmmakers were obviously not acquainted.