Pensive / We Might Hurt Each Other (Rupintojelis)

 "A bunch of teens partying on a remote lakeside cabin get massacred by a mask-wearing lunatic." That's about as straightforward a premise as possible for a low-budget horror movie, but Pensive seems somewhat uncomfortable with the possibility of being labeled as 'just' another slasher. This is both good and bad news.

 We're introduced to said bunch of (questionable) teens in their high-school graduation ceremony. They're a diverse bunch of stereotypes - the long-haired bohemian slacker (Povilas Jatkevicius), the golden boy jock (Kipras Masidlauskas), the popular girl (Gabija Bargailaite), the cool outsider (Saulė Emilija Rašimaitė), a zonked-out party dude (Martynas Berulis) and a bunch of others who don't really get any sort of personality assigned to them. They've all got their futures worked out - all of them except for our point of view character, Marius (Sarunas Rapolas Meliesius), who seems to be a bit of an outcast. The kid's so boring that, hilariously, his parents have already mapped out a career in insurance for him.

 When plans for the graduation party fall through, Marius seizes on a chance to try and score some social points (and impress the popular girl) by proposing everyone go to a remote cabin his mother mentioned was vacant - one with a nebulous tragic story. The others enthusiastically take him up on it, and so the stage is set for a massacre.

 The cabin, it turns out, is populated with creepy life-sized wooden sculptures, which the teens proceed to gleefully deface... as the camera repeatedly observes from hiding places in the underbrush. Uh oh.

 The film sticks with the teens and their drama for a while - it's not until about the halfway point when the slasher bursts out of the treeline and starts massacring the statue-defacing intruders.

 From there on it's the familiar series of deaths, chases and frantic hiding, except that Pensive doesn't really seem all that interested in the nuts and bolts of your typical slasher. For one, the kids try to stick together, at least at first, so there's a couple of attacks that are unusual in that the killer basically wades into a small crowd flailing implements of death.
 But the main difference is that the action is more interested in the kids' reactions rather than on the ways they bite it.

 There's a cool (and silly) gimmick to the kills: since the murderer's been watching everyone all along, he knows how they defaced his statues - and he dispatches each kid according to how they treated his creations. So if someone used a sculpture for firewood they get burnt to a crisp, or if they smashed a bottle on it they get their face cut in two, etcetera. Besides a considerable bloodlust, the guy's got good memory.

 The problem is that with one honorable (and agreeably brutal) exception, most of the deaths are almost perfunctory - the vast majority, in fact, happen off-screen.

 It ends up being all about Marius and a handful of survivors, and the way they interact and react to the massacre; A sort of fucked-up coming of age story set against a teen bloodbath. There's a few twists on the way - nothing hugely surprising, but it's all appropriately grim and grimly funny.

 Director Jonas Trukanas (who co-wrote the script along with Titas Laucius) knows the genre well, and his roving camerawork gives the movie a lot of energy. Neither he nor cinematographer Rokas Sydeikis figure out how to make the frequent night in the woods scenes very interesting, but they do manage to get some memorable shots (especially when things start burning).

 Despite a considerable amount of violence and distress, there's just a tiny amount of gore, and much of the mayhem is more implied than shown.
 I had next to no sympathy for any of the characters, save for the outcast and the bohemian; Almost everyone manages to show some at least some flashes of humanity, but just about the only aspect we see of these people is their douchey party-loving personas... something I've never had any time for.
 So without the vicarious pleasure of annoying teens getting picked off in creatively bloody ways, the focus is instead their survival, and honestly I couldn't give a single fuck about that. I did like where the film eventually headed, at least.

 The title card reads We Might Hurt Each Other, but the film its sold here in the UK as Pensive - a literal translation of its original Lithuanian title, so I'll go with that. It references a traditional type of wooden sculptures that feature Christ either during supplice or bummed out at the prospect of said supplice, it's unclear. I've had this on my to watch list for ages based on some positive festival buzz, and while I personally didn't find it wholly successful It's still pretty good arthouse-adjacent take on the subgenre.