Talk about disappointing. Started in the sort of quiet, unambitious, but tense way some of my favorite little indie horror films do—reminded me in a strange way of “Yellowbrickroad”, a flawed masterpiece in my eyes that takes a lot of chances and ultimately comes down on the right side of them, especially in how it made good use of daylit woods for tension, increasingly rare to find these days as a wooded setting has become such an overused horror movie trope. But then, it descends into the a hackneyed use of just throwing together a bunch of nonsensical hallucinatory scenes of surreal, unexplained “scary” things happening, one after another, with no real explanation why, in lieu of a plot. By the time it was over I couldn’t figure out what the story even was, besides “Woman gets a job as a park ranger in the backcountry, hallucinates a lot of weird stuff from her past, then is a park ranger again.” Eventually I looked it up on wikipedia, which explained it, and actually the fundamental idea, like the quietly spooky first act, wasn’t bad. But the execution was just disjointed.
