Director: Berkley Brady
Year: 2023
Country: Canada
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
Trying to move past a traumatic incident, a scared woman joins her friend on a wilderness retreat with several other similarly scarred women on the trip, but as they spend time trying to heal themselves they come to believe an even deadlier threat is stalking them throughout the woods.
Review:
Overall, this was a rather fun if problematic effort. Among its better features is a strong and wholly engaging central setup featuring quite a lot of really effective build-up of the main situation. Generating quite a lot of effective scenarios over the trauma of the initial incident that is obviously still mentally crippling her to the point of needing to go on the exercise as a means of helping to overcome the hurdle of what happened to her, the scenes of the trip being interrupted by the idea of someone seeing a shadowy figure in the woods or the sound of his eerie whispers and habit of flicking the lighter echoing in the harsh terrain all come off incredibly strong here. With the experience matched equally well with the atmospheric terrain and the hardships they endure while on their hiking trip, the first half here becomes quite effective at setting up a great overall scenario with people that are worth being around.
With this in place, the film’s turn into a creature feature in the second half is quite fun and has a lot to like. As the group is continuously interrupted in their attempts at healing with visions or hallucinations that someone or something is potentially stalking them in the area, the first encounters with it are justifiably written off as such without realizing the danger inherent in the creature looking to hunt them down. Once they realize it’s there with some stellar ambush scenes in the woods taking group members away in terrifying scenarios not knowing it’s out there until it’s too late, the rest of this undertakes a fantastic series of cat and mouse chases that are extremely effective offering a couple great kills, enough spots at the creature to get an idea of what it is and some solid reveals that make enough reasonable guesses at what’s going on that there’s a lot of likable elements at play, all of which are more than enough to make this a fun overall effort.
That said, there are some big factors to hold this one down. One of the biggest drawbacks is the main genesis of the film in that the central setup that provided her with the trauma to overcome doesn’t carry as much weight as it should. The idea of what he does is kept rather light and is off-screen more than anything, rendering a lot of this one to rely on her story about what happened to carry sympathy towards her without being informed of anything else beyond the one isolated incident that isn’t as overt as it thinks it is. Moreover, this build-up provides the film with such a long setup that it takes an incredibly long time for it to even get to the creature action mentioned which is all pretty much isolated in the final half-hour anyway so you’re stuck watching these characters interact for long periods of time without a lot of genuine horror happening. This might not be that big of a deal for some and can easily be overlooked but they do lower this one somewhat.
Overview: ***.5/5
A generally solid creature feature let down by several small flaws, that not all of its flaws are genuine and can easily be seen as more of a personal preference making this a highly enjoyable feature. Those who are fine with its issues, are intrigued about this one, or are fans of the style here should have a lot to like with this one while those that don’t care for those factors should heed caution here.
Comments
Post a Comment