Funereal Plots

Horror Cinema reviews

Matthew M. Bartlett

Lovely, Dark, and Deep {2023)

A park ranger hangs a handwritten sign over the wooden one that marks his post. “I owe this land a body,” reads the note, stained with coffee cup rings (a nice touch). Then he walks off into the forest.

Some time later, Lennon (Georgina Campbell, star of the excellent Barbarian), the man’s replacement, drives in to her new assignment: Along with a larger group, she’ll be covering a section of the vast backcountry grounds of Arvores National Park. Take nothing, leave nothing, kill nothing is the mantra drilled into the rangers’ heads during their orientation by Zhang, the head ranger, and a refrain repeated throughout the movie. And so headlong we go with Lennon into the forest, where we get glimpses and hints of why she’s actually there.

For a story that’s meant to slowly unravel a mystery, a lot is told directly to the audience via thuddingly straightforward expository info dumps, such as the radio program (which sounds like a podcast) Lennon is tuned to on the drive, in which the hosts discuss the disappearances that have long plagued the park—confusingly, the same radio program is still going the following afternoon, the hosts continuing the discussion where it had left off the night before (here, the careful listener will be clued in to part of the solution of the mystery).

To drive home the point, our eyes are directed to the Missing Person posters that pepper the walls of the base camp, one of which is a picture the ranger we saw walk off at the start of the movie.

Before the plot is set into motion, there are some curious scenes with Lennon’s fellow camper Jackson, who is there, it seems, merely to try to tease out Lennon’s background, which he fails to do, and to provide fresh batteries for her radio, which nonetheless seems to squawk and sputter and say mysterious things even when its batteries aren’t in.

A camper goes missing. Lennon, disobeying orders to remain at camp, locates and rescues the missing camper, bloody and confused. “Are you real?” she asks. For Lennon’s transgression, she is dismissed for the season, despite having located the missing person…or is it because she did?

Rather than wait around to be airlifted out, she heads off into the wilderness. There are strange transmissions in her battery-dead radio, a leap in either time or space, and then a confusing headlong rush into a hallucinatory dream-logic world where she runs into a pair of hikers who can’t see or hear her, then discovers a building that is a labyrinth of memories and hallucinations. There she encounters her younger self, and her father as he was when she was young, and here we get a little more—but maybe not quite enough—insight into the trauma that motivated her to work at the campsite.

In the end, Zhang appears to provide a lengthy expository explanation/information-dump, and the two characters part ways to their separate fates.

Somehow the woods never seem to fulfill the promise of the title—they’re sort of sparse, reasonably lit, and less than lovely. And, similarly to You’ll Never Find Me, also reviewed on this site, there’s not so much a plot as a puzzle to be resolved. This movie sustains itself by its mystery, and it’s a compelling mystery with which they tease us, but despite the remote location and the air of conspiracy, we find ourselves wishing they gave their main character someone else to talk to besides Jackson, and that it let us a little more into Lennon’s world—something more than snippets of flashbacks—that may have given the story the weight that it needed.