The Glenarma Tapes (2022) (UK)

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Sometime in the year 2020, seven folks went missing in the Northern Ireland woods of Glenarma. One was found near death and in a coma, but it’s been a mystery as to what happened to everyone else. Well, two years later and the footage of that fateful trip to the woods has been found and answers, no matter how disturbing, are about to come to light. Gordy is a student at Mid Ulster College of Art and he is the subject of his buddy Jimmy’s class project. A kind of day-in-the-life video diary of his friend. When they overhear a drama teacher make an arrangement to meet up with his married co-worker in the Glenarma woods, they decide to catch it on tape and have themselves some blackmail material. They bring along a couple other friends, Eleanor and Clare, and “borrow” some Go Pros from the school and head out into the scenic forest. A shopkeeper fills them in on a disturbing local legend but, although they may be far more affable than the folks usually found in uncovered footage, they’re still youthful idiots (although, the heads on their shoulders are way better developed than 98% of dinks that come to messy ends in these kind of flicks)… so into the woods they go. The urban legend of some local weirdo nicknamed Harry Halfahead who haunts the forest where he failed at killing himself with a shotgun before eventually succumbing to his nasty head wound scares the hell out of Clare but the group carry on and are not deterred when they find the entrance to the woods closed off. The arrival of the two teachers convinces them to carry on. The quartet quickly stumble over an unsettling scene that looks like a ritualistic human hunt and they soon fall into the path of the awfulness. The film does a great job of fleshing out the quartet of friends, so it’s a lot easier for the tension to get ramped up when the shit hits the fan. They’re also incredibly believable as humans in the middle of an unbelievable situation. The footage is also believably chaotic as our heroes run around in the woods slowly grasping the ridiculous situation they’ve stumbled into and going off to meet their makers. Wild and refreshing in equal strides, only faltering slightly thanks to the limitations of the medium it’s decided to set the action in and the predictability that comes with it in even the best case scenarios… but then things get interesting.