Rating: TBC
Directed by: Mike P. Nelson
Screenplay by: Alan B. McElroy
Based on: ‘Wrong Turn’ by Alan B. McElroy
Starring: Matthew Modine, Bill Sage, Charlotte Vega, Emma Dumont, Damian Maffei, Valerie Jane Parker, Chaney Morrow, David Hutchinson.
Seeing the preview to Wrong Turn, it’s easy to think you’re in for another movie about a group of teens getting lost in the woods and murdered by some crazed hillbillies.
But ‘wrong turn’ doesn’t just mean, opps, went off the trail in the woods and got murdered. There’s the idea of the moral, taking a wrong turn, of right and wrong – the question of what is the right way to live, what code, what society; to even think about, what is sick and what is living.
It’s a difficult movie to review.
So I’ll try to outline a synopsis without giving too much away.
Three couples go hiking on the Appalachian Trail.
Immediately, the tone of the film is ominous with flames and scary locals, shadowy figures and the landlady of the B&B where the group is staying, warning: ‘The landscape can be… Unforgiving’ (kinda harking back to that, right and wrong, idea).
There’re rumours of people living on the mountain. Families going to live up there in 1859, to keep living the American Ideal. They call themselves, The Foundation.
Any strangers that leave the trail and get lost up there never come back. Either alive or dead.
But when Scott’s (Matthew Modine) daughter, Jen (Charlotte Vega) goes missing, he’s determined to find her.
And that’s where the film opens, to a father nervously tapping his clenched fist against his thigh as he drives into a small town in middle America.
The film starts as this visceral horror. Not too gory but shocking at times and clever in the suspense and pacing – cue soundtrack building to those unexpected jumps.
At one point Jen laments, ‘This isn’t happening.’
And it is surreal how the movie (getting a little metaphysical here) unfolds, still a suspense thriller but pushing some unexpected questions from the characters and ideas for the audience to think about. And it keeps going, with a horror-weird-society-cult-story layered with thought-provoking ideas like people’s preconceptions of what it is to live completely free from modern society being used to twist the story into another direction, so you follow the film into unforeseen places.
I really enjoy a film that starts as one type of movie to then open up and take the audience somewhere else.
What I thought was going to be a teen slasher move turned into so much more – but still with good jumps and hands-in-front-of-the-face action; not so confronting I couldn’t watch. But enough to get the heart pumping, to keep watching to see where the film took me next.
Interesting stuff. And entertaining.
Hope I haven’t given too much away because it’s such a pleasure to be surprised by a film and, Wrong Turn went places unexpected – worth a watch.