Black Mountain Side

 Oh, goddammit. This could have been something special.

 Black Mountain Side is an indie Canadian horror film about a group of archeologists stuck between a dig site way out in the frozen north and a small compound consisting of several bungalows tied together with a generator-powered electrical grid. They've just uncovered an ancient temple under the permafrost, one where the native populations didn't have any settlements. As the film begins the expedition lead, Jensen (Shane Twerdun), welcomes an expert (Michael Dixon) to validate their findings.

 It's in this introduction that the movie is at its absolute best; It's full of procedural detail of the running of a remote camp like this, gorgeous footage of the surrounding frigid valley, and lots of authentic-sounding archeological shop talk.

Poor Fleetwood Addison-Szostakiwskyj :(

 But this is a horror movie, and soon strange enough things start happening. The escalation is well handled: The local help disappears, an animal is found sacrificed at the site, people start behaving erratically - that sort of thing. And then it's discovered that the unearthing of the temple has freed up some sort of pathogen that's infected the crew, one that affects them psychologically as well as biologically. That revelation in turn pits everyone against each other as paranoia sets in. Sound familiar? Well, just in case one obvious influence isn't enough, there's some bonus talk about the foreign cells becoming... cephalopod-like.

 What follows is a pretty cool exercise in psychological horror with some fantastical elements that sadly fails to gel because it feels like the script never really seems to settle on what it wants to be about. There's that poorly-defined mysterious illness (nothing comes out of all that cephalopod talk), whispering in the dark, self-mutilation and a mysterious animalistic figure; But to be brutally honest, the film's attempts at cosmic horror are laughable - a gravelly voice speaking to each character in turn, trying to get them to kill each other? That's fine. But as soon as it tries to claim to be all-powerful or to be more than a delusion... well, it's clearly bullshitting. We just saw you communicate through some wall-mounted furniture, buddy. You're not fooling anyone.

 The thing is that even as the script (by director Nick Szostakiwskyj) flails and fails to find a coherent approach, the characters remain believable and the deaths are as chilling as anything I've seen lately (most of the violence is quick and almost underplayed, and all the more effective for it). At its simplest, it's an extremely effective (if derivative) movie about an isolated group of people going nuts, which leaves me in the odd situation of kind of wishing they'd ditched the more outré Carpenter and Lovecraft influences. Not something I'd expect to be saying very often.

 It's such a disappointment. The whole thing is beautifully shot, the acting is well pitched between heightened and mundane, there makeup effects are pretty cool, and the choice to not have any music whatsoever pays off some big dividends. It ends with a killer punchline, too, its humour black as the endless gulf between the stars. But there's a hollowness at the film's center that an excellent setup and a modest amount of very well-executed creepiness and carnage can't really make up for.

 I really wanted to like this so much more than I was able to.