Rating: D+
Dir: Gino Raphael Payne.
Star: Jenna Karan, Tori Ellis, Dawson Mullen, Angel Parrish.
I’ll take “Film Titles They Didn’t Think Through Fully” for $600, please, Alex. Still, I guess you will remember it, so it’s doing its job. Truth be told, the name may be the most memorable thing here. It definitely is not the pacing: at 113 minutes, it’s a good half hour too long, and it feels like this excess all comes at the beginning. By the time anything of note happens, your attention will be as bereft of life as Lake Pearl, the body of water at the centre of proceedings here. It’s the destination for Mia (Karan) and her boyfriend Kai (Mullen), where they will meet their friends, successful influencer Vicki (Ellis) and her druggie boyfriend Angel (Ponce).
You’re probably already ticking off the clichés as they happen. You will need to take your shoes and socks off, because fingers will be insufficient. An encounter with “something” on the road. [I’m still waiting for the repair guy he booked to show up: “AAA’s gonna be here in the morning with a new tire”] On arrival, they meet creepy cabin owner, Sabrina, and later, the still creepier groundskeeper, Mr. Leonard. Mia has a Traumatic History™, specifically her mother drowning a year or so ago, in a body of water just like Lake Pearl. So, why not take some ‘shrooms from Angel? They’re sure to mix beautifully with her prescription meds. Then Kai goes missing, and you’d expect things to ramp up from this point.
Nope. Mia and Vicki wander the woods, rather than – oh, I dunno – bothering to call in the authorities. Probably because this is the kind of location where phones work only when needed for the plot. Eventually, Mr. Leonard takes pity on them (and the audience), and reveals the truth behind what has been going on. This comes at roughly the eighty-five minute mark and, trust me, it is not particularly worth the wait. Things do ramp up slightly from there, although you only get to “goon” for about ten seconds. I should probably reword that. Anyway, it’s weird, because the makers leaned heavily into promoting the fact that the creature was played by Fumie Suguri, a Japanese figure skater who took silver at the 2006 World Championships. She is currently not even on the film’s IMDb page.
It’s not a bad monster (top), and the overall mythology of it isn’t terrible. It’s more the case that, with so much lead-up – and, by “lead-up”, I largely mean, “wandering around the woods” – the pay-off needs to be considerably more worth the wait. The ease with which dispatch is accomplished is positively facile, and it doesn’t help that none of the characters feels like ones I’d want to have a drink with. Never mind being trapped in a remote cabin where the wifi is down, and forced to rely on each other for survival. The tagline here is, “Beneath the surface, a terror lies in waiting.” Unfortunately, the key word there is “waiting.”