Five middle-aged friends meet up in London, trying to work out where to go for a laddish holiday. One of them stumps for a hiking trip in Sweden, and is shot down by his mates, who want to go to Vegas or Amsterdam. While still deciding, two of them - Luke (Rafe Spall) and Rob (Paul Reid) duck into an off-license to buy some booze.
Still talking about the trip, the two notice a terrified, wounded woman lying in a corner. Luke manages to hide behind the shelves just before two robbers come out from the back. There's a discussion, a scuffle, and then Rob is dead, with Luke petrified not two meters away, still in hiding, unable to act.
Six months later, the remaining four are in Sweden, honoring their lost friend at a particularly scenic stretch of mountains.
Luke is consumed by grief and guilt, and feels (correctly, it turns out) judged by the others. Hutch (Robert James-Collier) is the most gregarious, trying to keep the group together and insisting that they're having fun; Phil (Arsher Ali) is mostly quiet, and Dom (Sam Troughton) is the standard-issue asshole of the group. The way others complain about him when he's out of earshot is pretty amusing, and the dynamic felt pretty realistic to me.
No one except Hutch seems very happy with the hike, and things get complicated quickly when Dom has a fall and twists his leg. Dreading the long trek to the next shelter with Dom complaining every other step, Hutch decides to take a shortcut through a wooded valley. They find a gutted deer strung up on high on the trees (hey, that looks familiar!) and still press on.
Before you can say 'cabin in the woods'... that's exactly what they run into. A derelict one with a creepy antlered pagan idol in the second floor; but it's raining outside, so the group decides to bunk up inside anyways.
Bad choice; they all wake up screaming the next day, wrapped up in nightmares. Luke finds himself outside (after a pretty nifty dream where the off-license mixes with the forest- a cool bit of imagery that keeps reoccurring throughout the movie) with a strange wound in his chest, Dom is near catatonic, Hutch's pissed himself, and poor Phil is discovered upstairs, naked, prostrated in front of the idol. Should make for a fun war story back at home; "It was just like that time in Vegas!"
Except that, you know, this is a horror movie, so they probably won't make it back. Spoilers, probably.
Luke keeps seeing something out in the forest, a big and nasty something that at some point is going to get tired of just toying with our hapless hikers. After an hour or so of careful setup, the movie finally pulls out its claws and goes nuts, to good effect. It's not entirely successful, but there's a respectable amount of mayhem and weirdness.
The script by Joe Barton (adapting a novel by Adam Nevill) is functional, with a decent ear for dialog and some interesting imagery. Luke's failure to act during Rob's death seems to be an addition for the movie, which makes sense because while it's seamlessly integrated into the events, it nonetheless feels a little extraneous and doesn't really add much to the proceeds. I'm glad they put it in, though, because Luke hallucinating bits of what Americans would call a drugstore into the middle of the woods, fluorescent lighting and all, makes for some amazing visuals. Barton also keeps any explanations mysterious, besides some vague mythological handwaving, which seems like the right choice.
The effects are good. We do get a good look at the monster and luckily it's pretty great, though the film's budget doesn't really allow it to do as much as I'd like. We know it can uproot trees, for example, since the hikers witness the aftermath several times - but it never does it while the camera is on it. There's some pretty graphic gore, but not a huge amount. What's there is made all the more disturbing by how matter-of-fact it is; but the film's best and creepiest scenes are all down to set design.
David Bruckner's proven to be a good director several times over - first with his segments on The Signal and the V/H/S series, then with The Night House and the recent Hellraiser reboot. I have my reservations with the latter two - especially Hellraiser 2022, but they're both interesting, well crafted and engaging; This one's no different. It looks as great as his movies usually do, but with Sweden's natural beauty in its corner (cinematographer: Andrew Shulkind).
What I most admire about Bruckner is that while his movies are... a bit staid, to be brutally honest, he's got an appetite to portray a level of weirdness that feels missing from most horror at the budget levels he's been working with lately. Whether it's the living void at the center of the Night House, Hellraiser's gorgeously batshit final scene, or a few bits and pieces here: the monster, an incredibly creepy (and way too short) scene in an attic- the guy's got one fucked-up imagination and a knack for pouring it successfully onto the screen. He's one of those directors I keep rooting for; One of these days, mark my words, things are going to come together just right and he's going to show us all how it's done.
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