"Strayed" is an effective psychological horror movie, which is finally undone by its length. It would have been a stunning short movie.
A man and his wife and son travel across the Kazakh steps, a landscape that seems truly in the middle of nowhere. The man decides to take a short cut and realises he is lost. The man and wife squabble, he goes to sleep, and awakens to find he is alone - but for a mysterious house nearby, the inhabitants of which speak in riddles, and seem to know what happened to the man's family.
They're a family themselves: a strange, demonic old man, and his exotic beauty of a daughter, clad in a snake skin dress.
Like the environment itself, the movie is sparse and unsettling, but it finally becomes a little too light on the ground. It could have been a classic short movie, but instead it's a pretty good long one.
A man and his wife and son travel across the Kazakh steps, a landscape that seems truly in the middle of nowhere. The man decides to take a short cut and realises he is lost. The man and wife squabble, he goes to sleep, and awakens to find he is alone - but for a mysterious house nearby, the inhabitants of which speak in riddles, and seem to know what happened to the man's family.
They're a family themselves: a strange, demonic old man, and his exotic beauty of a daughter, clad in a snake skin dress.
Like the environment itself, the movie is sparse and unsettling, but it finally becomes a little too light on the ground. It could have been a classic short movie, but instead it's a pretty good long one.