The trip isn't particularly well planned and they spend a chunk of time looking at scenery and larking about before getting on with the task at hand.
At night they can hear ominous booming that might be a thunderstorm and the local wildlife begins to act strangely.
No good will come of this.
CW: strobing lights, shaking camera with disorientating viewpoint, blood, gore, mutilation, psychedelic as fuck
I can imagine people walking out of this. I almost switched it off.
It takes the "group of friends disappear in the wilderness" found footage genre and turns it into a nightmarish unexplained and unfathomable gore laden bad trip.
Think the psychedelic final act of something trippy by Moorhead & Benson or Ben Wheatley but dialled up to 11 and lasting about 50% of the runtime. It makes Beyond the Black Rainbow look like a Tom Clancy adaptation.
It's the most intense thing I've watched in years.
The camerawork is largely "dangle a camcorder from a lanyard and run around" style. If you can't deal with that you mustn't attempt to watch this. On top of this large amounts of that is compounded by being at night with the only light a wildly swinging, often strobing torch. Lots of the time you can only extrapolate what's going on from the sound.
Every now and then there is an utterly transcendent image or sequence that little can rival then suddenly it's gone.
The sound design is excellent throughout.
Wikipedia suggests it was made for $15000 but you can imagine adding three zeroes to that for the same outcome. Or removing them.
There's a very disappointing moment near the end where they do a bit of brief visual exposition that I wish wasn't there. Then the person who might perhaps be called the viewpoint character cuts his own penis off with a large animal tooth found in the dust and disembowels himself. This doesn't count as a spoiler you knew nobody was going home.
I watched this so you don't have to. It is both 0/10 and 10/10 at the same time. I feel a bit sick now. I'm glad films like this continue to exist but I don't want to watch them.
Fuck