★★★ out of ★★★★★
🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Teresa Sutherland
Lovely, Dark, and Deep is the story of Lennon (Georgina Chapman) a National park ranger who is spending her first assignment in the isolated backcountry. It is an assignment she has been working toward, not because she loves the solitude, but because years before her sister disappeared into thin air on a family park outing and she wants to use this time to look for answers. Her sister isn’t the only person to have gone missing in the park, and soon Lennon is enmeshed in the search for another missing person as her past and present begin to collide under supernatural circumstances.
Director Teresa Sutherland who penned The Wind and worked on Mike Flanigan’s Midnight Mass set out to make a film “based in reality – in this case the real-life conspiracy theories surrounding the unusually high number of unsolved missing person cases that happen in national parks and forests.”
The film, which starts as a backcountry adventure, morphs into a surreal, reality bending, fever dream…and it becomes a little too dreamy for my taste. Moreover, Georgina Chapman was a big draw for me follwing her stellar performance in Barbarian, but her performance here was incredibly flat. Those “cons” aside, the film is beautiful to look at and the story was engaging, offering up enough chills to ensure I stay within the safety of four walls and out of a tent!
Lovely Dark and Deep just had its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival. Stay tuned to The Scariest Things for news, trailers and the release date of the film.