Rating: NR | Runtime: 72 minutes
Release Date: January 13th, 2023 (USA) / February 6th, 2023 (UK)
Studio: Cinedigm Entertainment Group
Director(s): Pete Ohs
Writer(s): Andy Faulkner, Callie Hernandez, Will Madden, Pete Ohs & Ashley Denise Robinson

You don’t know where you are, do you?

There are three ways to get rid of a ghost. 1) Give it what it wants. 2) Let it decide to leave on its own. 3) Enlist another ghost to kill it. You could say Pete Ohs’ Jethica propels itself forward from these choices once its central conflict depicting Elena (Callie Hernandez) and Jessica (Ashley Denise Robinson) trying to escape an unwanted visitor in the form of the latter’s stalker Kevin (Will Madden) reveals its hidden truth.

He’s followed her from California to Santa Fe and now suddenly shows up on Elena’s grandmother’s property once the two old high school friends serendipitously run into each other at a gas station. Jessica welcomes the chance to rest after having driven days on end in the hopes of losing her tail. So, hearing him call her name from outside Elena’s trailer can only bring dread.

Why? Because he shouldn’t be there. Not just because Jessica was careful to leave no trace of her whereabouts, but because Kevin is dead. Apologies to those who may consider this fact a spoiler, but I don’t think you can talk about the film without it being out in the open. The majority of the runtime is literally these two women trying to get him to leave under his own volition and forcibly at the hand of another ghost.

I also don’t considering it a spoiler because Kevin’s presence is little more than the reason to get these two friends together after all this time. The movie is a flashback after all—one that begins as a tale of when Elena killed a man. One ghost therefore leads to another. One woman’s physical demons lead us to another’s psychological demons until we discover the dead are fighting their own right alongside them.

This detail is both the best and worst parts of the film. Because where it allows for some deeply introspective thoughts on loneliness and guilt, it also asks the audience to empathize with an objectively abusive character in Kevin. The entire principal cast has co-writing credits alongside director Ohs, so we can assume Jethica is mostly ad-libbed off a concrete layout of checkpoints.

As such, one can also assume that the group found their way towards exorcising those demons for Elena, Jessica, and Benny (Andy Faulkner) the best way they could without perhaps seeing that doing so also exorcised Kevin’s too. That’s not to say he shouldn’t be given that opportunity. Just that making his road to closure be “someone is finally listening to me” badly diminishes the pain he wrought.

For those who haven’t gone through what Jessica has, it’s perhaps a minor point. For those who have, however, it might be a dealbreaker. I don’t know since I’m in the first camp. So, despite it not being enough to ruin my experience, I did feel it necessary to at least mention the potential if only as a trigger warning of sorts.

Because the film’s overall message and execution is conversely very well reasoned and orchestrated. Seeing how Ohs and company achieve that success on a small indie budget while subverting genre conventions might be worth having to sit through that other blunder. And if you do find yourself enjoying what it has to offer, don’t forget to stay through the credits for one last scene.

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Callie Hernandez and Ashley Denise Robinson in JETHICA; courtesy of Cinedigm.