Folks disappearing into thin air is a crisis plaguing national forests worldwide. I’ve read the books. Written by a man with questionable morals. So it all must be true. McKenzie’s sister Marylyn has become a number in that troubling statistic but McKenzie is not going to sit back and take “We can’t find her.” for an answer. Along with her brother Martin (a knockoff Stephen Dorff), Martin’s fiancée Darcy, Darcy’s brother Edgar who has just gotten out of the hospital following a manic episode and Gerrik, their British pal who supplies comic relief, the group journey into the Cinder National Forest to find the missing girl. Marylyn had left a journal behind which featured some odd claims about doorways to different dimensions and nature not behaving as it should. These claims are enforced by a local named Leon who knows a thing or two about the high strangeness of the area and was in communication with the missing girl before she apparently slipped into the void. McKenzie figures this all sounds insane and thinks it best to keep this from her search party companions. Leon provides a couple vials of red liquid which he says will fend off the hallucinations that are definitely in the groups future. So it’s into the wilderness and into the paranormal clutches of things we humans could not possibly comprehend. May the forest Gods bless a solid cast and gorgeous filming locations because it gives your film a nice head start while it works towards revealing its cards. Family drama, suspicious claims and mystery motivations serve as building blocks but the odd woods quickly begin to play with the group almost immediately after entering the park. Ghosts and monsters haunt ‘em all, starting with the unstable Edgar so the hikers have a reason to doubt the growing uncanniness at first. An unsetting sun, an opening murder, woodland sex (dirt and leaves getting where dirt and leaves should never be is not an erotic scenario), hallucinations of something inhuman, possession and a central mystery that works well enough to keep you focused while it picks apart our group of heroes. Yeah there’s some predictable bits and yeah the British guy gets on the nerves every so often and yeah there’s some questionable story paths and sure there’s some eye-rolling thanks to overblown melodrama but it’s more intriguing than grating and the paranormal threat is given some thought as opposed to just slapping a cgi monster into scenes and spraying blood on the wall. It’s like a tame Evil Dead with a science fiction twist produced by a disgraced CW writer as an extended two-part pilot for SyFy… and that’s alright in my eyes.
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