Rating: C+
Dir: Johannes Persson
Star: Molly Nutley, Sofia Kappel, Vincent Grahl, Joel Lützow
While pushing the envelope is a laudable aim, there are times when films are better off sticking to what works. This would be one of them. The middle section, which is the most basic and primitive of concepts, is where the movie is at its best. The beginning and end are considerably less successful. We start with a group of “influencers” heading out for a commission to help a rural campsite re-brand themselves as a glamping destination. Matters among them are complicated because of a relationship, for Internet purposes, between Dimman (Grahl) and Josefin (Kappel). This is of concern to his current girlfriend, Elin (Nutley), who doubts his protestations this is just for likes, shares and subscribers.
Feel free to ignore all of this, because none of it matters much. Instead, they end up stuck on an island, out of contact, and with something in the water intent on picking them off. The site owner told them the inevitable legend, of a woman in bygone times tortured by the locals, who feared she was a witch. She ended up committing suicide in the lake, and now has the power to move wherever there is water. Oh, and the weather forecast calls for rain. We never clearly see what is responsible: normally, this would be a cop-out, but here it doesn’t matter. It’s highly entertaining to watch these smug millennials fall apart, even attempting to sacrifice a wounded member of the party so they can escape.
It helps they are too busy trying to survive to engage in irritating chit-chat, selfies, or any of the annoying first act behaviours. These had us wondering when we’d get to the slaughtering. The middle section makes up for this, with a fairly consistent stream of high tension, a nasty bit of impromptu surgery (post-op cauterization, top), and some nicely creepy imagery. Sure, there isn’t much in the way of personality beyond Elin, and she might as well be wearing an outfit from the Final Girl collection. But as an aquatic-themed slasher goes, it’s effective, and highly preferable to the nonsense which preceded it. Feels as if the film suddenly received a stiff memo from its Kickstarter supporters: “Is this a horror movie?”
Unfortunately, once they [minor spoiler] manage to get off the island, the film takes another wrong turn – as opposed to a Wrong Turn. It gets bogged down in an explanation which, although tied to the opening act, does not work. I’d far rather it had been a moistly vengeful, medieval witch. Minor spoiler: it is, in fact, not. Instead of the momentum which the film had nicely built, we’re left dangling for too long – literally, in the case of some characters. It’s not often a film suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder, but this one truly is a movie of three halves, Brian. [Memo to Film Blitz fact-checker: please verify the math there] Unfortunately, only one of them is worth watching.