Wendigo?
I don’t know when he went, leave me alone.
I’ll be honest, it took me a few tries to watch this fully. I often got about twenty minutes in and gave up. It seemed a bit too quaint, too saccharine and earnest in its low-budget family realism.
Since then I’ve watched The Man from Earth and its quaint naturalism moved me. This has done the same thing. It wrings actual fear and unsettling atmosphere from its DIY aesthetics, our two leads give as fine a performance as you’re likely to get, Fassenden’s editing is oftentimes sublime and the direction is ingenious in never allowing the seams to show too readily.
But its strength lies in the aforementioned atmosphere. It nails its approach to child-forward horror. The fear of being alone, being scared of the non-existent, the fear of things beyond your tiny purview. Skinamarink tried to mine a similar emotional nostalgia with mixed results. It attempts to sublimate and dissect the childhood experience rather than letting you live in it. But here- a child’s bedroom, nursery rhymes, cryptids- it coalesces into something strangely affecting and beautiful, while also being genuinely creepy in parts.
There’s a naturalism to everything. Even when the costumed Wendigo does show up, it’s edited well enough to keep up the immersion, or even break it enough to play into the film’s themes.
Strangely, the scene that impressed me the most was Otis talking to Sheriff Hale. It’s not creepy, not emotional, but it’s just pitch perfect. Each of them knows the other is lying. It’s a tense interplay of fuel being poured on the fire and someone trying, calmly, to put it back out again.
Impressed me a lot. Looking forward to a rewatch.
Wendigo?
I don’t know when he went, leave me alone.
I’ll be honest, it took me a few tries to watch this fully. I often got about twenty minutes in and gave up. It seemed a bit too quaint, too saccharine and earnest in its low-budget family realism.
Since then I’ve watched The Man from Earth and its quaint naturalism moved me. This has done the same thing. It wrings actual fear and unsettling atmosphere from its DIY aesthetics, our two leads give as fine a performance as you’re likely to get, Fassenden’s editing is oftentimes sublime and the direction is ingenious in never allowing the seams to show too readily.
But its strength lies in the aforementioned atmosphere. It nails its approach to child-forward horror. The fear of being alone, being scared of the non-existent, the fear of things beyond your tiny purview. Skinamarink tried to mine a similar emotional nostalgia with mixed results. It attempts to sublimate and dissect the childhood experience rather than letting you live in it. But here- a child’s bedroom, nursery rhymes, cryptids- it coalesces into something strangely affecting and beautiful, while also being genuinely creepy in parts.
There’s a naturalism to everything. Even when the costumed Wendigo does show up, it’s edited well enough to keep up the immersion, or even break it enough to play into the film’s themes.
Strangely, the scene that impressed me the most was Otis talking to Sheriff Hale. It’s not creepy, not emotional, but it’s just pitch perfect. Each of them knows the other is lying. It’s a tense interplay of fuel being poured on the fire and someone trying, calmly, to put it back out again.
Impressed me a lot. Looking forward to a rewatch.