Like the foreboding, swooping helicopter shots above Glacier National Park that open Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic , overhead shots track a lonely car crawling through the mountains to a remote highway rest area in the woods. There, five strangers ride out a snowstorm in , the latest from Australian genre-bender Damien Power, whose last film, 2016’s Sundance breakout , was a master class in dread and level villainy.
The resolute lead in is model-turned-actress Havana Rose Liu as Darby, a recovering drug addict who has fled her Sacramento rehab to reunite with her mother, who’s been taken to a Salt Lake City hospital.
But like Marion Crane in , bad weather and a detour prove deadly when a blizzard waylays Darby to that isolated rest stop, where the group therapy dynamic in rehab is echoed in a congregation of strangers, each with their own agenda and neuroses. There, a Marine vet (Dennis Haysbert), his nurse wife (Dale Dickey), a greasy-haired creep (David Rysdahl) and a hottie with melty puppy eyes (Danny Ramirez) all shelter from the blizzard. Venturing out into the cold to search for a cell phone signal, Darby discovers a kidnapped little girl locked in a van, which cues a cat-and-mouse game to find out which of her temporary roommates has abducted the child.
Viewers can stake their bets on who among the strangers is the baddie. A script by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, adapted from the 2017 novel by Taylor Adams, tries to keep things moving until it eventually just flips the table in a fit of pique, throwing logic out the window.
Beyond the innovation of casting its resilient, kick-ass female lead with an Asian actress, doesn’t do much else with the thriller genre, a disappointing shift from the high-water mark of Tasmania-born Power’s debut shocker , which tread similar storytelling ground to , including a steely heroine let down by the men around her who has to take matters into her own hands. That film featured a classic pair of joined-at-the-hip killers — the rapist weak link and a psychopath bully pulling his strings — chasing a family and one plucky toddler through the Australian woods. Letting Power put his own writing chops to work in his American debut might have vastly improved , which has a hard time ratcheting up the tension and creating the kind of dread that made such an unrelenting nail-biter.
’s script ladles on the usual plot twists and body horror, introducing new, grisly ways to assault flesh and bone. But the tension is lukewarm. The script relies on a string of increasingly dopey implausibilities that require too heavy a lift in suspending audience disbelief, as well as a foe not up to the task of inspiring genuine terror. Liu gives a serviceable performance as a rebel in a Sonic Youth t-shirt rolling her eyes at the self-aggrandizing addicts in her group therapy. Darby hails from a long line of transgressive women who battle monsters with ferocity and pluck to match even the epic “final girls” of ‘70s horror like and . But the script doesn’t offer this young actress the support she needs to make her final girl showdown as cathartic as it should be.
It’s a pity, considering Power’s directorial chops and skill for adding new elements to the survivalist horror genre, as in , which joined other backwoods classics like in pairing two genuinely sympathetic young lovers on a misguided camping trip with a disturbingly twisted horror plotline. Australian independent cinema has long delivered freaky psychological horror, and has milked a -style city-folk-in-the-outback tension since 1971’s all the way through to 2005’s .
Hopefully for his next go-round Power can get back to his indie Aussie horror roots.
