Director: Sam Freeman
Year: 2026
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Psychological
Plot:
Recovered from the surviving footage available, a couple went into the woods for a camping trip that will prepare them for their upcoming baby being born, but as the night carries on, they come to believe that a supernatural force is peasant coercing them to behave quite unnaturally.
Review:
This was an intriguing if somewhat frustrating enough feature. The main element that works rather nicely here is the central setup that allows the couple to get stranded in the woods and encounter an increasingly bizarre series of encounters. The couple going out into the woods and trying to have fun going through the wilderness, even though they’re unaware of how, why, or even that their phone turned on to record everything that happened to them, brings about a wholly enjoyable concept that gets them lost while trying to figure out where they are when they make a wrong turn and get lost. The escalating panic that happens when they start failing to recognize where they are, believe that a strange child is watching them in the woods, and have to get under cover from a massive storm that strands them even further, gives this one quite the chilling idea that slowly gets expanded upon over time, the more lost they get.
However, that also leads heavily into the major issue here, where the film is so fractured, by design, that it can easily become distracting and off-putting. The fact that we never get any clear look at the forest around them for more than a single second, ninety percent of the film is spent looking at a pitch-black screen where nothing has a clear focus, and only the final few minutes are the footage completely intact and uninterrupted, which all presents a major challenge to get into the film properly. From the brief glimpses of something happening that is shuttled off for a pitch-black nothingness and a circular narrative that never makes any sense with so much of the regular running time consisting of inaudible yelling over each other that it’s hard to get attached to what’s happening without being able to see anything, the film is a rather hard sell at times for those expecting any kind of logical outcome, all of which come to hold this down.
Overview: ***/5
An intriguing attempt at found-footage that does have its missteps, this one comes off rather well when it wants to, even if some of the big flaws on display are what keep this one down overall. Those with an interest in this type of story or who are major found-footage aficionados will have the most to like here, while most others out there should heed caution.
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