I settled in hoping to watch a soulful indie thriller and instead wasted an hour and a half of my life. With films like this you win some and lose some and wow, man, this one was a stinker.
Guy & girl run off into the snow-covered mountains for a weekend of raw, rugged, beautiful nature even though they're outdoorsy-deficient. While shooting through the back-country on their very first snowmobile, off-trail and miles from civilization, Guy spots someone creepily standing in a clearing and is spooked enough that he crashes their only motorized way out.
Girl is entirely unlikeable. As in, strangle-her-in-her-sleep unlikeable. And, once the creepiness begins and the baddies begin invading the couple's campsite, Guy irrationally runs off to be a hero, never to return. We're left with unlikeable Girl, for the rest of the film, being dimwitted and insufferable and, again, unlikeable. The baddies keep coming, there are a few jump scares, Girl gives about zero thought or effort to manning up and saving herself by fighting back against the baddies, and she fails to conclude that humping her way over the terrain to get home would be smart. Until she does decide to hump her way out, which leads to the film taking nonsensical turns until the end, when she finds out that - boom, in a schlocky twist I'd expect from an M. Night Shyamalan snoozer - the snowmobile crash ended up killing them both and the baddie is actually her guide to heaven. See, he's been following Girl until she came to terms with the accident and death, and once she agrees to go with him he'll lead her out of what is essentially a purgatory. And he's not actually the baddie, the baddie is the devil. Or something.
So, here are my questions:
1) If Girl was having doubts about the relationship, a burden she was so willing to unload on Guy in a bitchy bit of dialogue when things started getting rough, why would she agree to participate in what surely would be a difficult, stressful and uncomfortable weekend in the middle of nowhere, snowed into a small tent, with Guy she's pretty sure she wants to dump?
2) So, baddie-turned-spirit-guide can cause the accident that killed the couple, but he can't get them to heaven unless they choose, under their own free will, to go with him? So... Wait... He's powerful enough to kill but not powerful enough to do his job which is "saving" people?
3) Who heads off into the middle of nowhere, in winter, with just enough food to last a few days under the best possible circumstances?
4) Why does the spirit guide think that silently staring at the couple from behind the trees is a good thing? You would think, in his heavenly wisdom, he'd realize that it would actually creep people out.
5) How does Girl spend the entire movie crying, streaks of mascara and all, while never showering - you know, wilderness and all - and yet her makeup looks professionally applied in every new scene?
6) Why doesn't spirit guide intervene when the devil terrorizes Girl night after night? Is he powerless to intervene? But wait, he isn't powerless to causing gruesome, deadly accidents.
I think there were a few good ideas in this film, but I'm positive the writer/director would never stumble upon them on his own. He needs an editor - and if he has an editor, he should be fired immediately.
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