The movie starts alright, with a nice premise. But then when the story begins to play out, it's just a weird messy chain of events that not always seem connected, things happen where you'd expect more of an explanation to you - the audience - or more of at least a conversation between the characters, but no, it goes from scene to scene without really connecting or making sense. Many times I found myself thinking "wait, what?" or "But why?"
The transitions from a moment to another feel wrong, it's like it lacks pieces of the movie where they actually show how things play out, or the characters having actually normal human behavior.
One example from the top of my head is, both main and co-main characters are inside a cave at night, even though they could be sleeping in a house like they were before. One of them starts freaking out because of *reasons*. She's just uneasy inside the cave and that's that. Runs out of the cave into the woods. Suddenly there's a wolf just a few meters from the cave and the character runs back to the cave, apparently scared of the wolf, meets the other person who stayed behind, hugs her crying, never mentions the threat of the wolf, and then they do breathing exercises together and go to sleep. Aaaaaand scene! Like WTF?
The characters are frustratingly one dimensional, flat, cliché and derivative. Apart from the main and co-main, the rest just seem like NPC from a video game. They just come in for a scene, have some time on camera (mostly doing something "mean") and then just disappear for sometime, before they show up once again to be a**holes one more time.
Then there's the overly used super dragged out scenes in the forest, where a character is just walking around, surrounded in mist, looking at things (mostly treetops or the sky) mesmerized, drone New Age music in the background, nothing happens and then just cut to something different once again. And you don't really know how it went from one thing to the other.
Hints of witchcraft and sorcery are also thrown here and there, but again that's never explored, it's superficial and light.
The movie, overall, lacks depth, lacks better developed characters, the storytelling here is just so bad, so disconnected, so random, that it really ruins a good premise and what could've been a good story. Also, weird choice of dividing the film in "chapters" that do nothing to give structure to this failure of a storytelling attempt.
One example from the top of my head is, both main and co-main characters are inside a cave at night, even though they could be sleeping in a house like they were before. One of them starts freaking out because of *reasons*. She's just uneasy inside the cave and that's that. Runs out of the cave into the woods. Suddenly there's a wolf just a few meters from the cave and the character runs back to the cave, apparently scared of the wolf, meets the other person who stayed behind, hugs her crying, never mentions the threat of the wolf, and then they do breathing exercises together and go to sleep. Aaaaaand scene! Like WTF?
The characters are frustratingly one dimensional, flat, cliché and derivative. Apart from the main and co-main, the rest just seem like NPC from a video game. They just come in for a scene, have some time on camera (mostly doing something "mean") and then just disappear for sometime, before they show up once again to be a**holes one more time.
Then there's the overly used super dragged out scenes in the forest, where a character is just walking around, surrounded in mist, looking at things (mostly treetops or the sky) mesmerized, drone New Age music in the background, nothing happens and then just cut to something different once again. And you don't really know how it went from one thing to the other.
Hints of witchcraft and sorcery are also thrown here and there, but again that's never explored, it's superficial and light.
The movie, overall, lacks depth, lacks better developed characters, the storytelling here is just so bad, so disconnected, so random, that it really ruins a good premise and what could've been a good story. Also, weird choice of dividing the film in "chapters" that do nothing to give structure to this failure of a storytelling attempt.