Yellowbrickroad [second viewing]

This is a movie that has lived on in my heart, and vividly the corners of my mind, ever since I first saw it—so much so that I had a little bit of trepidation about watching it again. Would it live up to my recollections? The answer: yes, absolutely. This is one of those movies I’m not sure I’d ever recommend to anyone else, but it plucks my strings just right… made with zero budget and very little by way of plot, in terms of story this entire movie is nothing but a group of hikers losing their grip on reality. And the ending is straight-up terrible, no way around it. But the journey there, just the walk in the woods slowly going incomprehensibly wrong, not even for any reason that’s ever given, I find just gripping and disturbing. Worth noting, I usually multitask when I’m watching movies, and even on this second viewing this one sucked me in and distracted me from my laptop. Possibly the most disturbing horror movie set mostly in daytime. It’s really a movie about losing control, to me a much scarier thing than any monster. This is one of those movies that, while nobody will ever call it a masterpiece—make no mistake, it’s a low-budget indie flick from start to finish—but I find (and a lot of reviewers seem to agree with me) something about it is very affecting; it sticks in your mind. It’s a quietly-building grotesquerie. I bet Lars von Trier likes it, or would. And I’m reminded of Roger Ebert’s review of von Trier’s “Antichrist”, which essentially says, “I can’t say I liked it; but I can’t stop thinking about it.” This one is the low-budget indie version of that. (EDIT: Googling around, I found this page of extremely polarized comments on Reddit that sum it up nicely: https://www.reddit.com/r/horror/comments/xq7okl/yellowbrickroad/ )