94 min | R | June 14, 2024 | IFC Films
A slasher movie told from the killer’s perspective. The camera follows Johnny as he walks through the woods and murders people. It is ambient horror. It is also genuinely disturbing.
Someone takes a locket from a collapsed fire tower in the Ontario wilderness. This resurrects Johnny, a mute, undead killer who wants his locket back. The camera follows Johnny. It walks behind him through the forest. It watches him pick up weapons. It observes him kill. The victims are standard slasher fare. College kids in the woods. But the film inverts every convention of the genre by staying with the killer instead of the prey. The effect is hypnotic and nauseating.
Ry Barrett plays Johnny with lumbering physicality. He does not speak. He does not emote. He walks. He kills. The performance is entirely physical and it works because the film asks nothing else of it. The victims are heard before they are seen. Their voices float through the trees. They are having conversations about normal things while something terrible walks toward them. The film gives the victims enough personality to register but not enough to mourn. That is a deliberate choice about where empathy belongs in a slasher.
Chris Nash writes and directs with the patience of a filmmaker who understands that horror lives in the spaces between violence. The forest is shot with long, static takes. Birds sing. Insects buzz. Johnny walks. The pacing is closer to Gus Van Sant than Friday the 13th. When the kills arrive, they are spectacular and grotesque. One kill involving a yoga pose is one of the most creative and stomach-turning practical effects in recent horror history. Nash earned that moment by making you wait for it.
The film is not for everyone. The pacing will drive casual horror fans out of the theater. The ambient approach demands patience that the genre rarely asks for. But for viewers willing to meet it, the film reframes the slasher genre in ways that feel genuinely new. Seeing the world through the killer’s eyes does not create sympathy. It creates unease. That is the point.