Healing Andy

After the ill-advised exploration of potential supernatural phenomena, probably the most popular pretext for a present day found footage film is the extended influencer video. These generally centre on young women, so director Villablanca has done something a bit different by making his about a group of thirtysomething men on a lads’ vacation. He’s also indulged in a little bit of blurring of genres, with occasionally delightful results. There’s a reason why this screened at Frightfest.

The vacation in question was originally planned as a honeymoon, but Andy’s (Matthew Kay) fiancée dumped him, deciding that she was in love with someone else, just before the wedding. Naturally, he’s distraught. The first pieces of footage come from Zoom meetings in which his friends try to cheer him up. Then they break the news: he’s going to be going on holiday anyway, not with a new wife but with all of them, and they’re going to make sure he has such a good time that he feels better.

It’s a sweet motive which encourages us to root for them from the outset, even when they’re behaving in ways that might ordinarily ring alarm bells. They’re sweet people, really: loud and heavy-drinking and superficially boorish but deeply attached to one another and well-intentioned towards the wider world. We follow them through two airports and all the way to their destination, a spacious villa on the outskirts of a small Spanish town. There they meet US-born holiday rep Ginger (Gemma Acosta) and get excited about how good looking she is. When they meet her in the town later and she has three similarly attractive friends with her, they think that fortune has smiled on them. They really are that naïve.

The bad headaches in the morning, the absence of the women, the absence of their passports and wallets – none of that will surprise the average viewer. It’s what happens next, after they decide to find out Ginger’s address, wait until she’s out and then sneak in to retrieve their stuff, that makes the film take a turn. It’s the calendar with ‘night of the prophecy’ scribbled on it; it’s the trails of blood on the floor; it’s the strange artefact in the box, the thing they call the Eye of God.

As the genre flips, so does the style of the film. A drunken argument separates Andy from his pals, so that suddenly we are confronted by multiple unknowns, and the happy camaraderie of the first half is replaced by disarray and panic. Ginger reveals a whole different side to her personality, with Acosta lurching into a ferocious, instinctive, driven performance of the sort we’re still unused to seeing from women at the this point in cinematic history. She’s not the only reason why the lads feel threatened, but she’s a lot of it, and Villablanca makes use of the format to have her really get in the face of the viewer.

Even when the film is at its darkest, there is humour. Villablanca is interested in addressing a common audience response to horror films: to wit, that they could do better. Whilst it’s not hard to imagine being more competent than these particular protagonists, the film points up the gap between imaginary scenarios and real life experiences, where emotion is much more of a factor and careful plans can be undone by a single unexpected event – as well as how ridiculously ill-equipped the average person is to deal with real danger. This in turn serves us a reminder that even the best-equipped humans probably shouldn’t be confident about their chances with outer gods.

Cleverer than it looks, and not altogether as cynical, Healing Andy may not always succeed in its tricky balancing act but it deserves praise for doing something so different. It’s best watched with a group of drunken friends to recreate the initial atmosphere of Andy’s vacation – and for those planning such trips, it might serve as a useful cautionary tale.

Reviewed on: 05 Sep 2025