Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
In the early 1970s, Dr. Henry West creates an institute to find people with supernatural abilities. When Judith Winstead comes to the facility, she exhibits amazing abilities that the military wants to turn into a weapon.
The Atticus Institute is a competent found-footage horror that benefits from a genuinely unsettling central performance and a reasonably clever pseudo-documentary framing set in the 1970s paranormal research milieu. The plot is serviceable — blending government conspiracy with demonic possession — and holds together better than many genre entries, though it runs out of steam in the third act as the military-weapon angle gets muddled. Acting is above average for the subgenre, with the lead portrayal of Judith's possession being effectively creepy. Cinematography is constrained by the found-footage conceit and rarely transcends it, feeling functional rather than distinctive. Novelty gets a slight bump for merging the institutional/government-experiment angle with the possession narrative in a way that feels modestly fresh, though the formula is still recognizable. The ending is underwhelming and retreats to genre convention, failing to capitalize on the intrigue built earlier.