99 min | R | October 29, 2021 | Searchlight Pictures
A teacher returns to her dying Oregon hometown and notices a boy whose family hides something starving in the dark. The thing in the house is a Wendigo. The thing in the town is worse, and it has no shape you can shoot.
Julia Meadows comes back to a decaying Pacific Northwest mining town and takes a teaching job alongside her brother, the local sheriff. One of her students, Lucas Weaver, draws violent pictures and keeps a terrible secret locked behind a bedroom door. His father has become host to a Wendigo, the starving spirit of Algonquian legend. Scott Cooper wraps the monster in a thicker story about addiction, abuse, and the rot that sets in when an industry abandons a place. The film wants the creature to mean something. It means several things at once, and the weight cracks the structure.
Keri Russell plays Julia with the brittle alertness of someone who fled this town and got dragged back. She watches Lucas and recognizes her own childhood in his silence. Jeremy T. Thomas plays Lucas as a hollowed-out child who feeds the thing in his house because it is still his family. Jesse Plemons plays her brother Paul with a tired decency that keeps pulling rank when he should be listening. Graham Greene grounds the mythology as a former sheriff who names the creature without flinching. The performances stay quiet and bruised in a film that keeps threatening to get loud.
Cooper directs from a script he wrote with C. Henry Chaisson and Nick Antosca, and his instinct for atmosphere is sharper than his instinct for theme. Florian Hoffmeister shoots the town in wet greys and starved browns until the daylight feels diseased. The creature design keeps the Wendigo in shadow and partial glimpse for most of the film, building dread out of antlers and wet breathing rather than reveal. The sound work treats the thing as a presence in the walls before it is ever a body on screen. When the monster finally stands in full light, the effects honor the restraint that came before.
Cooper builds a genuinely grim machine and then asks it to carry a sermon. The trauma allegory sits on top of the horror instead of growing out of it. Every metaphor gets spoken aloud by a character, which drains the dread the images had earned. The result is a creature feature with real craft and a thesis it never trusts the audience to find. The atmosphere lingers. The meaning announces itself and evaporates.