This film got under my skin.
It’s an American Gothic about researchers trying to retrace the steps of a NH community that walked off en masse into the wilderness in the 1940s, and slowly losing their minds in the woods themselves. And that’s really about it.
It’s a flawed gem, original, and really disturbed me, despite an unsatisfyingly, almost Lynchian-cryptic (in a bad way; think “Mulholland Drive”, not “Eraserhead”) ending. It has a low rating but extremely polarized reviews on IMDB, a lot of people either really hated or really loved it. I’d watch it again for sure, and years after having seen it, I can still vividly recall a lot of it, because so much of it just plain really got to me. We go to horror movies to be disturbed, and somehow this odd film disturbed me viscerally, in a way that films with a much stronger narrative seldom have.
I could see it as a double-feature with Open Water… they’re both kind of very effective mood pieces without much real plot, and both are movies that I could see a lot of people not liking, but which I found oddly stirring.