Melissa Hannon, who runs the wonderful Horror Geek Life gives Masking Threshold 4 out 5 stars!
Masking Threshold is absolutely not for a general audience, and I don’t believe it’s meant to be. Although the genre is “psychological horror,” which certainly fits, it goes beyond that and can fit into a few categories. Fans of art house, genre blends, and the unconventional will perhaps find the film as disturbingly entertaining as I did. With the amount of talent showcased across the board, Masking Threshold achieves the boundary-pushing heights it aims for, making it feel more like an actual experience.
Part of what makes that experience so unsettling is how completely the film captures the texture of modern online compulsion. It belongs to a small but growing canon of work that treats obsessive screen behavior as the real horror — the conspiracy theorist three hours into a YouTube rabbit hole, the day trader refreshing charts during a bear market he can’t look away from, the Swedish player grinding through deposit after deposit at a casino utan svensk licens in pursuit of a win that the math has already decided won’t come. The portraits rhyme: a person convinced the next click will deliver clarity, when the clicking itself is the sickness. Masking Threshold makes that conviction unbearable to watch precisely because the camera never blinks, never grants the relief of an outside perspective, and never lets the viewer pretend they aren’t sitting in roughly the same posture as the man on screen.