Originally published on Set The Tape
The forest is a spooky place. It’s an almost default setting for horror stories, likely due to humanity and its long history with travelling into the unknown of the forest to survive being a source for folk tales and spooky beliefs. Finding the forest creepy is almost a part of our very genes. The idea that there’s something lurking out in the trees, unseen, unknowable, is enough to get you on edge. And it’s this primal fear that writer and director Teresa Sutherland draws upon for her new movie, Lovely, Dark, and Deep.
Lovely, Dark, and Deep tells the story of Lennon (first name never given, played by Georgina Campbell), a park ranger at Arvores National Park, who’s going to be spending the summer at a remote ranger station out in the woods.
Having spent some time working closer to the public, helping out hikers and being a direct point of interaction with them, she’ll instead be spending three months in a small hut, walking around her sector clearing away rubbish left behind, undoing anything hikers have made, and maintaining nature. It’s a remote, isolating job, but one that she feels drawn to. Her first few days go well, and she settles into her quiet new role. However, when an injured hiker comes banging on her cabin door in the middle of the night it will set her on a path that will lead her to learning why so many people go missing in Arvores, and just what is lurking out in the depths of the forest.
Sutherland’s feature length directorial debut is a truly beautiful film. Thanks to filming in the Gerês national park in Portugal, which bears a striking similarity to the Arvores national park in California, the film has some stunning shots. The depiction of nature in Lovely, Dark, and Deep is both beautiful and haunting, and it’s impressive how quickly Sutherland is able to move us from one to the other with a subtle shift of the camera. More than once I found myself staring at the vast wilderness as Lennon marched along her patrol route, hoping that the film would take us off to look a the line of trees in the distance, or that we’d hop across the river to see what was on the other side. The film shows you how easy it is to get lost in nature, something that’s a key theme of the movie.
The film begins by telling us that hundreds of people go missing in America’s National Parks every year, and that not all of them are found. In fact, quite a lot never are. Having a quick look at the stats online reveals this to be shockingly accurate, and it’s easy to find accounts of people who have worked on searches for missing hikers and holiday makers and the difficulties that they faced. Lovely, Dark, and Deep dives headfirst into this phenomena, and seeks to provide an explanation for what happens to these people. That’s the main drive for Lennon and her reason for being out in the woods; not to help those who go missing, but to try and find closure for a tragedy in her own past.
Campbell plays Lennon well, and it’s clear from the very start of the film that she’s a woman dealing with something. She has a quietness to her that shows that there’s something more there, that there’s something more than just a love of nature that’s driving her to spend months alone in the park. Campbell plays her both incredibly vulnerable and stoically strong; something that almost feels like a contradiction.
There are times where it feels like she’s able to handle anything, where she displays a great deal of strength and determination, but as the film progresses it’s more and more obvious that the trauma and horror of what she’s going through is building, and that a break must be coming. It’s not an easy role, and the fact that Campbell spends a great deal of the film as the only person on screen means a lot of it is being carried by her performance. She is joined by both Nick Blood, and Wai Ching Ho, both of who play more experienced rangers, but they only appear sporadically, and in supporting roles.
Outside of Campbell, it’s the location itself that’s the main character. The film makes the park feel alive, and not necessarily in a good way. Places that at first feel beautiful slowly become more and more sinister, and there’s the sense that Lennon has already been swallowed up by some unseen entity, that just by stepping foot into the park she’s already surrendered herself over to its power. Whilst a lot of this is done by slowly building tension, there are times of more overt horror in the film, moments when a shadowy figure appears, or something twisted and shocking is seen in the background behind Lennon. These moments caused me to yell out loud more than once, and whilst they were disturbing and awful did feel like a relief as the ever mounting tension finally broke.
My only real criticism of the film is that at just 87 minutes in length it was too short for me. I wanted more. I wanted a deeper dive into the forces at work in the park and the strange things that call it home. The film goes deep into Lennon and her past, and I came away feeling like I had a good handle on her, but I still wanted more. Even if it was just more in the early stages of the film, just showing her working in the park. I’m not even sure what I want more of, just that I wish the film had been longer because I enjoyed my time with it that much.
Lovely, Dark, and Deep doesn’t hold your hand, it doesn’t spell things out for you, and it leaves you with the opportunity to make your own deductions and decisions. I enjoyed this aspect, and liked figuring things out as it went. And whilst I came away fully understanding the story, the person I was watching it with didn’t quite get everything. As such, this might be a film that leaves some feeling like they need a second watch-through, or may even send them looking for an ‘ending explained’ type article or video. But if you like stories that aren’t just simple by the numbers horrors filled with jump scares and predictable plot, that actually get you thinking and leave you wanting more, this is a movie you’re going to want to try out for yourself.
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