Director: Michael Shanks
Year: 2025
Country: Australia/USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Body-Horror
Plot:
Heading out to the woods, a frayed couple trying to make their relationship work inadvertently get stuck in a small section of the woods, which starts to affect them to the point that they realize that they’re slowly being drawn into a devastating physical connection with each other.
Review:
This was a pretty disappointing and unremarkable genre effort. Among the few positives to this one stems from the main setup, which brings a lot of questions, but at least has a theory about something potentially happening. The main concept involving the couple coming to a remote location and finding something strange in the woods where they live that starts to physically affect them afterward makes for a strong starting point that gets progressively more intriguing the more setbacks and bizarre encounters that follow. The loss of bodily control, unexplained visions, hallucinations, and the unexplained blow-ups that arise when they try to come together set about a really intriguing setup that brings about a chilling concept that comes together into a gruesome exploration of each other. As a whole, this concept works incredibly well and sets this up incredibly well to give this a strong starting point.
Beyond that, there’s not a whole lot to the film overall. The main problem here is that the absolutely asinine and unlikable main couple is that it derails everything about what’s going on. There’s little about the couple that makes them worth following, where she spends the entire time controlling and belittling him for his career, lack of ambition, and just plain condescending nature, for what should be a decade-long partnership between them, that it comes together into a generally troubling whole. While we’re supposed to like them, the fact that they have little chemistry and what they do doesn’t feel like they belong together at this stage, for the length they go to is a big issue here. While it’s not supposed to trigger anything since they’re depicted as a toxic couple from the start, there should still be something intriguing about the main couple that brings us onto their side following this experience.
The other fact that holds it back is a storyline that, might offer up an intriguing idea in general, has way too many plotholes and questions to ignore. The rules of the cave being unexplored is the main one here, where all we know is that the cult discovered it brought couples together once they both drank from it, yet there are still a lot of issues here regarding how it works. The properties of how it all blends people together, what happens if only one person drinks from the well water, or how the cult found out about it, as all questions that come about due to the weak writing here. As well, the finale is a mystery here about what’s going on with the amalgamation creature that appears, which has way too many unexplained conditions simply for the sake of getting a shock effect. Beyond these questions, the inability to pepper the running time with as many scenes of body fusion as expected, so it’s not as packed as you want, all come together to hold it back.
Overview: *.5/5
Watchable enough for what it is but heavily disappointing, there are some enjoyable factors to be had here, but way too many issues that manage to bring it down quite a bit. Those with an appreciation for the genre or who aren’t bothered by the flaws featured here will have the most to like with this one, while most others out there should heed caution.
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