As a woman recently in her thirties, I think I can say, with some certainty, that as we age there is no more appealing thought than just fucking right off into the woods.
Right? Maybe I’m biased, after I grew up on the edge of the woods in the Highlands of Scotland, but there’s such an allure to heading off into the forest. The freedom, the quiet, the creatures, the foliage – inhale a great big lungful of that clean air, and get yourself turned around at least four times before you find your way back to the right path.
And perhaps it’s that endless urge to just vanish into the woods that has always made horror focused on that premise so compelling to me – from In the Earth to my beloved Blair Witch Project, I adore horror stories that use the denseness of nature as a backdrop, finding the sinister in all that expanse and quiet. Which is precisely what drew me to Lovely, Dark, and Deep, the full-length directorial debut of Teresa Sutherland (who I first came across via her work on the brilliant Midnight Mass) – it follows Lennon (Georgina Campbell), a first-time park ranger allocated to Arvores National Park where a mysterious childhood tragedy changed the course of her life for good.
I’ve written a little before about the way the Blair Witch stories uses the woods as a kind of parallel universe, tapping in to an almost otherworldly kind of horror through the enormous expanse of this untapped territory, and, for me, Lovely, Dark, and Deep is the most perfect natural extension of that notion. It’s an unabashedly cosmic take on the rural horror story, as Lennon navigates her way through this nightmarish otherworld deep in the woods – drawing on both her own traumas and experiences in Arvores and on the curious forces that seem to have jurisprudence over this place and the rules of reality therein.
And, of course, a lot of this is down to just how bloody great Campbell is in this role – she’s an actor I’ve seen pop up in supporting and one-off performances across genre fiction for a while now, but this should rightly be her breakthrough. Everything she brings to the role, she does almost wordlessly, building out this character who’s been haunted by the impossibility of what happened to her for most of her life – it’s a killer performance, and one that I sincerely hope starts her on a run of horror movies to come. Wai Ching Ho, in a role that could all too easily just have been functional, finds a profound depth as Zhang, a senior ranger who’s been trying to manage this territory for decades – her appearances are limited to just a handful of scenes, but God, she’s such a treat to watch.
And for a directorial debut, it’s such a brilliantly confident start for Sutherland – for a movie that’s so abstract in its storytelling, she never loses her grip on the imagery or the deep sense of history that stretches this story back decades, maybe even further. I really appreciate her restraint in not trying to deliver some definitive answer for the cause behind the strange cosmic horror, instead finding that balance between explanation and interpretation that’s far more compelling.
Lovely, Dark, and Deep is the blend of cosmic and rural horror I’ve been craving for so long – and, now it’s here, all I can hope for is that we get a whole lot more just like it. I’d love to hear what you think of the movie in the comments below, if you’ve seen it, and if you’ve got any more recommendations for movies in this vein, I’m all ears!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Film Snob Reviews)
No But Listen 