Backcountry (2014) Review

Backcountry (2014) Review

 

Alex takes his girlfriend Jen on a camping trip in the woods of Ontario, intending to take her to the Blackfoot Trail, a place he loved going as a kid, but it’s been a while since he’s gone. This is Jen’s first camping trip, and while they’re both excited, there’s a bit of tension, even from early on. Alex ridicules her for bringing bear spray, as well as a road flare. Here’s the thing about Alex…he’s kind of a dumbass. When the park ranger offers him a map, he declines. When he’s then offered an emergency kit, he takes it, but does so begrudgingly.  Worst of all, he notices Jen texting on her phone a lot leading up to their trip, so what does he do? Takes her phone out of her backpack when she’s not looking and leaves it in the car. It could have come in handy when they end up getting completely lost, even though he says there’d be no signal out there. But like Jen says, “I would have loved to try!”

As foolish as Alex is, both of them are still likable enough, and it feels like you’re watching a real couple. On their first night out a questionable guy named Brad comes across their camp. He stays for dinner, and makes Alex uncomfortable, but Jen thinks he seems nice enough. By the end of the night, though, they are both unsure of what to make of Brad, and this extended interaction makes up most of the tension in the first act of the movie. You kind of wonder if Brad might try something, or return later, but as time goes on and the couple get deeper into the backcountry, Brad fades from memory, because it becomes more and more obvious that something else is following them.

As dumb as Alex was with the phone earlier, he actually made an even bigger mistake: he saw a bear track and ignored it. They find a mutilated deer carcass, but keep hiking. They hear noises one night and find a snapped tree the next morning. Still, they keep hiking. It’s the kind of script that rides the line of believability and frustration. For some viewers, it will be understandable why they just trudged ahead and ignored a few of the more worrying signs along the way. For others, the trip would have been cancelled very early on, and every subsequent bad decision will just be another excuse for those viewers to turn the movie off.

We don’t see the bear at all for quite a long time, but its presence is hinted at enough that there’s some reasonable build-up to its eventual appearance, and the first time we see it is a pretty freaky moment. They’re asleep in the tent, and from inside the tent we see its face press up against the tent wall. Then, about an hour into the film, we get the scene we’ve been waiting for—the reason to watch this movie in the first place. The bear attacks the couple, and it is seriously one of the scariest animal attacks in any movie I’ve ever seen. Grizzly bears are most often used as villainous bears in film, but this one is a black bear, and they actually use a real one. The camera work is a little shaky, but without spoiling what happens, the attack is shockingly realistic, gory, and makes the rest of the film extremely intense.

Backcountry might be too slow for some, but if you can get through that first hour then you’ll witness one of the most underrated scenes of horror from the past ten years. The setting is refreshing, with a bit of a different look than a typical survival film thanks to the Ontario autumn colours, and there’s some interesting camera work throughout, such as shots where the camera is mounted to the characters and it looks a little like GoPro footage. While it looks pretty slick overall, sometimes the fact that it’s a small independent film shines through. As simple as the story may be, it’s the ultimate camping nightmare, and the fact that it’s loosely based on a true story makes it even scarier.