While wrong-turn backwoods horrors are a-dime-a-dozen, this film explores something more than mere murder and mayhem. The creepy grand matriarch of a motley band of misfits has some metaphysical mojo and a yin for your yang, making a powerplay for your very soul. You float in a wooded bardo, the naked expanse between an unrelenting sun shining into every hidden corner of your psyche with incisive intensity and a dark moon which threatens to swallow you whole. In three days, you are to be sacrificed, but first your very being will be pared down using the sharp edge of your own fears and desires, layer by layer, to your innermost core. Gooooood times.
The film uses a slow, smoldering burn to build the existential horror of the protagonists' predicament, with flurried sights and booming, dissonant sounds a la Lars von Trier's "Antichrist." While certainly not as masterful as von Trier, the film is an encouraging and refreshing feature debut. Given the use of the anglicized version of Carl Jung as the name of a main character, the film is also reminiscent of Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton's "Yellowbrickroad," for its depiction of a spooky forest pulling double duty as a vast Jungian jungle of the collective unconscious in which the mythic archetypes of our collective psyche must be fought or fled from.
This is an intelligent person's horror film, rather than the tired, skull-effingly boring formulism that typifies the vast majority of today's additions to the genre. My only critiques are (1) that the old woman's dialogue, which I'm fairly certain the audience is meant to be able to understand, is often post-processed to the point of inaudible oblivion, and (2) some of the dialogue's verbiage from other characters sounds a little pedestrian and lacking in polish, incongruent with the contextual gravity of the scenes in which it is spoken. That said, originality and departure from formulism go a helluva long way with me, as does the film's ability to provoke deep thought about dense existential subject matter. So I give it 6.5 stars out of 10.
As is so often the case when a thinking person's film gets bad reviews and bad ratings, it is for no other reason than so very many people will just not get it---or rather will not expend any more thought trying to "get it" than is necessary to process the short-attention-span, re-hashed dross that relentlessly churns out of the Hollywood conveyor. (Speaking of short attention spans, those giving just 1 star in their reviews all admit they were too impatient to get beyond around the 15-minute mark.) YES, it did have a plot and well-defined, if cryptic, narrative, and YES the film had a point, a compelling one at that. So when can bad reviews on art-house films safely be ignored? When they are suspiciously rock-bottom 1-star reviews that go beyond simply, "This film wasn't my cup of tea," to the spitting of angry venom, yet with a complete lack of any specific citations of supposed failure---a petty tirade which is nothing more than a thinly disguised declaration that, "This film made me feel stupid, so I hated it." All art-house films are plagued by these. Ignore them.
So, if you want gratuitous gore or torture porn with no dramatic underpinning and no existential substance, and if you want a director that will spoonfeed you neatly appointed plot points and resounding narrative resolutions, then look elsewhere, as this piece surely leaves the drooling masses wanting and wailing. If, however, you like a directorial and writing style that doesn't capitulate to formulaic demands for right-angled scene construction and all literary exposition through spoken dialogue, but instead tasks the viewer with finding meaning from the cinematic language and the consideration of mythic archetypes, then look no further.
Whoops! Sorry, I've got to dumb that down for the drooling masses, don't I? Fear what you don't understand? Movie bad. Want refreshingly original filmmaking that tries something new? Movie good. Want big-budget blood, boobs, and booms? Movie bad. Want cinematic subtlety singing a sinister serenade? Pass the popcorn.
The film uses a slow, smoldering burn to build the existential horror of the protagonists' predicament, with flurried sights and booming, dissonant sounds a la Lars von Trier's "Antichrist." While certainly not as masterful as von Trier, the film is an encouraging and refreshing feature debut. Given the use of the anglicized version of Carl Jung as the name of a main character, the film is also reminiscent of Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton's "Yellowbrickroad," for its depiction of a spooky forest pulling double duty as a vast Jungian jungle of the collective unconscious in which the mythic archetypes of our collective psyche must be fought or fled from.
This is an intelligent person's horror film, rather than the tired, skull-effingly boring formulism that typifies the vast majority of today's additions to the genre. My only critiques are (1) that the old woman's dialogue, which I'm fairly certain the audience is meant to be able to understand, is often post-processed to the point of inaudible oblivion, and (2) some of the dialogue's verbiage from other characters sounds a little pedestrian and lacking in polish, incongruent with the contextual gravity of the scenes in which it is spoken. That said, originality and departure from formulism go a helluva long way with me, as does the film's ability to provoke deep thought about dense existential subject matter. So I give it 6.5 stars out of 10.
As is so often the case when a thinking person's film gets bad reviews and bad ratings, it is for no other reason than so very many people will just not get it---or rather will not expend any more thought trying to "get it" than is necessary to process the short-attention-span, re-hashed dross that relentlessly churns out of the Hollywood conveyor. (Speaking of short attention spans, those giving just 1 star in their reviews all admit they were too impatient to get beyond around the 15-minute mark.) YES, it did have a plot and well-defined, if cryptic, narrative, and YES the film had a point, a compelling one at that. So when can bad reviews on art-house films safely be ignored? When they are suspiciously rock-bottom 1-star reviews that go beyond simply, "This film wasn't my cup of tea," to the spitting of angry venom, yet with a complete lack of any specific citations of supposed failure---a petty tirade which is nothing more than a thinly disguised declaration that, "This film made me feel stupid, so I hated it." All art-house films are plagued by these. Ignore them.
So, if you want gratuitous gore or torture porn with no dramatic underpinning and no existential substance, and if you want a director that will spoonfeed you neatly appointed plot points and resounding narrative resolutions, then look elsewhere, as this piece surely leaves the drooling masses wanting and wailing. If, however, you like a directorial and writing style that doesn't capitulate to formulaic demands for right-angled scene construction and all literary exposition through spoken dialogue, but instead tasks the viewer with finding meaning from the cinematic language and the consideration of mythic archetypes, then look no further.
Whoops! Sorry, I've got to dumb that down for the drooling masses, don't I? Fear what you don't understand? Movie bad. Want refreshingly original filmmaking that tries something new? Movie good. Want big-budget blood, boobs, and booms? Movie bad. Want cinematic subtlety singing a sinister serenade? Pass the popcorn.