Solitude (2024) (USA)

⭐️⭐️

Social media “celebrity” Kara Chase has taken up an extreme challenge with a million dollar prize for a popular show. Isolated in a remote stretch of wilderness, Kara has to survive the harsh conditions, painful hunger and complete lack of human interaction and outlast the other contestants. As you may have guessed, there’s something ancient out there and the area holds a very dark history. This horror is about to interrupt things and Kara may be heading to a disturbing end. The production crew monitors and attempts to make sure nobody comes to harm but when you’re up against something that nobody has any way to really prepare for, you’re just kinda fucked. They also know something weird is going on with the woods, as their more than capable contestants are tapping out faster than expected. The local Native legends don’t exactly paint a comforting picture of serenity. During a hunger freak out, Kara tips over a dead tree and discovers a very old journal… oh, Kara. No. She reads on, we get flashbacks to the doomed family concerned within and Kara now has mental terrors to go along with the possible supernatural ones knocking at her metaphorical door. Poor weather conditions causes a delay in wellness checks and the dude monitoring the footage is getting disturbed by the mounting spookiness. Sam Wren Vincent has a nice bit of charm going for her which makes the mostly one-woman show easy to sit through. I dread to think what this would have been like if we followed the exploits of an actual social media influencer, just an obnoxious void follower-mining. Granted, be a lot easier to watch that person go through hell and get eaten but that would be an ass-numbing eighty or so minutes to get there. It’s a cool idea that boldly doesn’t take the strictly found footage route (I mean, look at that setup) which would have made the budget constraints easier to work around. Unfortunately, the film’s intriguing idea can’t sustain the stretches of tedium. There is something monstrous hanging around our hero’s camp but we don’t really get to see much of it and the sound design isn’t anything odd enough to keep the tension ramped up. We get a glimpse of the thing as the film comes to a close and it’s a damn shame we didn’t get to see more of it. It’s a fine rendition of that old Wendigo.