Score one for AI. This small indie film has haunted me for years, as I forgot to review it when I watched it maybe a decade, until tonight I typed one image I vividly remembered, as well as a few other details, into ChatGPT and asked what film it was from, and after one wildly wrong try, it got it right.
This is a small indie horror flick that stuck with me just for being really weird. A man meets his drug addict friend out at a remote cabin the friend is squatting in, and chains the friend up, forcing him to spend a week going cold turkey. Strange encounters with other drug addicts, local security, and a team of foreign researchers there doing psychedelics begin to occur and they find films and videos that change with each viewing, and what is initially assumed to be haunted land turns out to be more a postmodern 4th-wall indie flick type thing in which media and stories figure into the story. All in all a pretty original outing, which scores big with the part of me that enjoys unique, inventive little indie horror flicks like "Yellowbrickroad" and "Pontypool".
I dunno. It's been so long since I saw it I honestly can't remember if it's even good enough to recommend. But it had images that stuck with me all this time, and 10 years later I want to watch it again, so, honorable mention.
UPDATE: two and a half years after writing the above I finally found this film again. I only recently discovered it's by the same team that made "The Endless", another surprisingly well-done favorite indie film, which addresses similar enough themes that I always imagined this film and that as a good double feature, even before finding out they were made by the same people.
It fairly well holds up to my recollection of it. Perhaps not the best for repeat viewing once you know where it's going to lead, but I think my initial impressions were justified.
The plot is as I remembered: man imprisons his junkie friend to force him to dry out in a remote cabin, and they find, essentially, the history of media—first old photos and handwritten journals, then slides, eventually a 35mm film, then an optical disc—with contents that appear to be relevant to them, and what began as a low-key gritty drama gradually morphs into something weirder.
What I didn't recall was how well-directed it is... a movie that gets this strange has plenty of points where they could have botched something and broken the spell, but they never do. In fact, what struck me this time is it's pretty much a conventional film for most of its runtime, where things go stuck with me for so long that I forgot they don't get there quickly.
Some people online have criticized the film for that and said it's too slow, but others definitely consider it a vastly underrated gem, as do I. I respect the slow, deliberate buildup, if anything... something this weird has to be handled well, and it is.
I can't honestly say it deserves to be in the same category as, say, masterpieces like "Network", and, honestly, it's slightly better on the first viewing when you don't know what to expect, which is the chief reason it gets "honorable mention" rather than "favorite" from me... favorites really need to be as enjoyable on the fifth viewing as the first. But, damn, it is definitely kind of its own thing, and deserves much more recognition than it ever got, and it's still a personal favorite. Not a lot of people make movies I like this much for $20,000, nor many even for $20,000,000.
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