With a film like Dooba Dooba, it would be easy to sit back and let the film’s gimmick do a lot of the heavy lifting. Written and directed by Ehrland Hollingsworth, this 2025 festival darling works hard to capture a certain analog horror aesthetic, with static cameras, a single location, and grainy footage. From a distance, you’d be forgiven for thinking you know how this will go.
But Hollingsworth’s film is about much more than capturing a mood. Yes, the analog horror fans out there will immediately come out to play with this one, and they’ll be satisfied, but the longer you watch this 75-minute found footage nightmare, the more you see both a haunting parable about America and one of the most chilling psychological dramas of the year.
It starts as so many horror films do, with a babysitter arriving at a secluded home for a night of work. The babysitter’s name is Amna (Amna Vegha), and she’s been hired for an overnight stay with Monroe (Betsy Slight), a 16-year-old girl who, due to her brother’s violent death a decade earlier, suffers from certain post-traumatic tendencies. Monroe keeps mostly to her room, doesn’t trust newcomers, and has developed a routine with her parents, Taylor and Wilson (Erin O’Meara and Winston Haynes), in which they say “Dooba Dooba” when moving through the house, just as a password to let the girl know trusted people are there.
Monroe’s issues are also the reason for the security cameras peppering the home, mounted everywhere from ceilings to the dining room table. Though Monroe’s parents explain that it’s a security blanket for their daughter, on a closed-circuit system, the cameras only add to Amna’s stress. She’s unsettled by this odd house and the somewhat standoffish way the parents interact with her, but she also wants to be a good babysitter, and she wants to honor Monroe’s particular needs in the best way possible. So, when Monroe’s parents leave, Amna makes an effort to reach out to the girl, only to find something much stranger and more frightening lurking in the house.
Going with an analog horror style – the film takes place in 2022, but the security cameras were clearly installed in the house well before that – adds an instant visual identifier to the film, but as with all the best analog horror, it’s more than an aesthetic choice. Yes, Hollingsworth’s cameras pick things up at strange angles, giving us partial faces, deeply unsettling compositions bordering on the abstract expressive, and uncanny close-ups, but that’s not the entire point. As with so much found footage, the goal is also to add a layer of verisimilitude to the proceedings, backed up by the often deliberately awkward dialogue between characters. We are meant to feel stuck in this uncomfortable situation, just as Amna is, and Dooba Dooba achieves that almost immediately through its camera placement and its often never-jangling sound design.
Every room’s tone is different in this house, and together they build into a symphony of buzzes and hums and clicks that keep the viewer constantly on edge. It doesn’t just feel like a stylized choice made by a filmmaker. It feels like we’re watching something forbidden, something that belongs in an evidence locker rather than on a movie screen.
Dooba Dooba is the kind of film that benefits from going in somewhat blind, so I won’t spill too much about the plot. What I will tell you is that it’s no accident that Amna is a woman of color, and Monroe’s family is a trio of white people all named for US presidents. What begins as a chilling tale about a strange family and the secrets they hide soon turns into a piece of jaw-dropping social horror, as Dooba Dooba explores the right that racist conquerors believe they have to the bodies of others.
The final act of this film is one of the more upsetting things I’ve seen in years, for that reason. It starts as House of the Devil and, by the end, morphs into something more akin to Get Out, all within a wonderfully creepy analog aesthetic. This is one of the year’s must-see indie horror releases, a skin-crawling watch that’ll leave you squirming.
Dooba Dooba hits theaters and VOD January 23.
