warning: bloody photos and mentions of death and violence ahead.
ah, our first entry into the psychological and cosmic horror page. i feel like i've been giving a lot of movies i review here a pretty high score, and that probably makes me look like a fanboy. so. i will introduce this movie as the first movie that i watched this year that i really didn't enjoy much. 2024 has been a massive success for the genre overall but just like any other batch of movies delivered to the public, not all of them are going to be gold star material.
let me preface this review/ramble with the disclaimer that i absolutely love cosmic/psychological horror. i do! it's one of the best forms of horror out there imo not because of the pretentious claims of "elevated" horror being the best, but bc a lot of art in the world is really the best when things are left to interpretation.
after all, nothing is more horrifying than the imagination. this is the truth, this is known. right?
welllll, in this particualr case i feel like this movie would have been a million times better if we had a little more to chew on, if y'all know what i mean. this movie didn't really seem to have much of a backbone to nibble on, and as a result probably ended up being one of the most paceful horror movies to come out of this year aside from In A Violent Nature. there's a lot of walking in the woods... a lot of flashbacks to kids running in those same woods i think? and some dialogue. tbh, the only thing that i remember about this movie is thinking that by the end of it, it was quite forgettable.
it's a damn shame really, because georgina campbell is a fave. after her role in Barbarian, i was super excited to see what kind of a performance she would be giving here. plus, the premise set in the trailer was really good too, and it hooked me right in. idk why, but i lowkey associated it with Annihilation for some reason, even tho i knew the plot wouldn't be the same. to me, it seemed like it would be a cross between Longlegs and Annihilation, and i fucking love both of those movies. so to say i went in with high hopes would be an understatement.
turns out... neither movies fit this film's structure whatsoever. we get to see georgina campbell volunteer to be a park ranger for a huge national park that somehow seems connected to her past. other rangers immediately take notice of her presence and she's very obviously gossiped about, very loudly. we get the image that she's somehow an outcast because of what she did in her past. that piques curiosity immediately. we're treated to multiple different flashbacks to her childhood, and that's when the mystery begins.
immediately, we're wondering about a lot. who is lennon (pictured right)? why is she so determined to work as a park ranger to the point that she'd been trying to land this job for years? and who is this goddamn little girl who keeps running thru the damn woods and yelling at us to wake up over and over again?
the plot crawls on at a snail's pace. lennon is assigned to walk thru the woods and help find missing people. y'know, park ranger shit. seems like a nice job to have if you're the outdoorsy type, i guess, but it is painfully boring to watch. i was wondering stuff like "i wonder how much the average park ranger's salary is?" and not stuff like "boy, i sure do wonder what's gonna happen next!"
i came up with many theories while i watched lennon walk thru the woods, have flashbacks, go back to her tent-cabin, find people, walk thru the woods some more and have even more flashbacks. were the missing people possessed by a mysterious entity or spirit? maybe a forest spirit? is lennon secretly schizophrenic and she's actually the one responsible for the missing ppl's disappearances (boooo)? did she somehow cause her own disappearance as a little girl? snatched and returned back as Not Lennon like the plot twist in Us? did jenny even exist at all? was she hallucinating absolutely everything or just the ending? god, who knows.
i feel like "fever dream" horror movies are all well and good, if the fever dream parts of it are handled well. i absolutely adore Donnie Darko and Velvet Buzzsaw and Mandy. i... did not adore this movie. it definitely dropped the ball towards the latter half of the movie when all the trippy hallucination shit was happening and we were actively delving deeper into lennon's past and her trauma. i feel like dwelling too much into the past sort of did this movie absolutely no justice in the end. which, like, i get it. we're looking into this film thru the eyes of a character who is clearly, obsessively hooked onto the past. she just cannot get over the disappearance of her little sister. but i feel like it truly threw itself in the way of the actual plot going on in the present, which i was personally more interested in.
the sound design was great and miss georgina campbell was still serving regardless, but the movie's focus on hitting us over the head over and over again with the fact that lennon was TRAUMATIZED happened to lead it to its downfall. i was lowkey wondering if at one point, the plot twist was going to be that she was the one luring people into the woods somewhat, and that SHE was the bad guy after all. turns out... the entire plot was revealed in the opening scene alone. the plot is paper-thin and straightforward despite its very atmospheric nature.
the forest is "taking" people left and right, probably as a sacrifice so that Whatever Is In The Woods doesn't, like... kill humanity i think. lennon is snapped out of a reel of her tragic past by zhang when she goes out walking into the woods one fateful night, and zhang reveals it all right there and then. "i've given them so many!" the head ranger says tearfully. "i regret her most." (pictured right)
boom. ending ruined in literally two lines. zhang then goes on to promise lennon that "she'll be one hell of ranger" before sacrificing herself to the Old Gods or whatever they are as atonement for what she did in the past. her admittance that SHE was the one responsible for lennon's sister's disappearance-- that just absolutely destroyed her family afterwards-- is a slap to our faces, and probably a slap to lennon's face as well. we're supposed to feel bad for this older ranger lady? after her inaction caused an entire family to fall apart soon after? bruh, give me a break!
i just think the plot is all over the place and not very well thought out. the acting was great, but the message was simply Not There. this was probably a movie that was inspired by lovecraft's flavor of cosmic horror, where these eldritch abominations reside in national parks in north america instead of like... idk deep in the ocean. but i don't think it did too well with mr. lovecraft's genre. zhang mentioned something about "maybe they keep us (rangers) alive bc we protect their space" by way of explaining why not everyone goes missing in the park's thick woods. makes sense... i guess. it's kinda funny tho, imagining eldritch beings beyond our comprehension choosing a group of its favorite humans to keep alive for the time being.
it's... kinda cute? but also pretty confusing
so yeah, in the end we learn that lennon was trying super hard to get back into the very same woods where her entire family experienced a profound tragedy because... well, we don't really know. maybe the eldritch forest gods also lure ppl back into their maws using tragedy and trauma or something, but... if that were the case, then wouldn't every single ranger have some skeletons in their own closets? the older ranger who we see in the very opening scene pastes a note onto a sign that ominously reads "i owe this land a body" right before he wanders into the woods and disappears. we never really get to hear his story, but from what zhang did in the very end, we can assume maybe you need to be sufficiently traumatized enough to become chow for dinner. the old gods love the taste of the good ol crraAAaazzy ppl. or maybe i'm just overthinking everything and i really need to stop yapping now lol
what would i give this forgettable title? probably a 3/10. loved the acting, and some of those horror visuals throughout lennon's weird tripfest she went thru there towards the end were phenomenal. the bathroom scene with the dad (above) and lennon's mom sat at the table chewing her skin off (right) were depressing in the most horrifying of ways. we really got the picture that this family fell apart fast after jenny's disappearance, but the cotton-soft plot that seems to go nowhere did absolutely nothing with this.
maaybbeee this is just a misunderstood release that won't be appreciated until much later on down the road, but... idk. i almost fell asleep halfway thru it so i can't be too sure abt that. even if it were as deep (no pun intended) as it purports itself to be, the obvious message and metaphors here don't even paint that much of a profound story regardless. if the forest is a metaphor for grief or whatever, and how delving too deeply into the past leads you to your inevitable demise, it's a horrible way to portray that message. zhang's "sacrifice" in the end completely dispels the effectivness of that message in more ways than one, so i refuse to believe that the forest represents anything but what it represents in canon: hungry eldritch gods.
they're just toying with these puny insignificant little humans, and that the real horror to be found here is how unimportant we are in the grand scheme of things. nature is ruthless, and death comes for us all, no matter how much we suffer. just like the old growth forest here in this movie, the grand scheme of things is much more massive and all-encompassing; its very nature escapes our fragile little minds, no matter how much meaning we like to assign to it all. just like how in lennon's hallucination harking back to her sister's funeral, the little girl's body was replaced by a dead deer; signifying that in the end, we're all just prey.
and if that's the purpose of this movie then i take back everything i said and applaud the cast and crew; they accomplished in making a movie just as aimless and purposeless as the cosmos, in that case.
overall, i wouldn't recommend this title to anyone except for insufferable snobs who insist horror can never be an elevated genre and they like watching black and white movies about nothing ever happening and no one ever doing anything. those kinds of ppl would love this movie, i believe
regrettably, there wasn't much that was lovely, dark or deep about this one i'm afraid.
thx for reading!
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