Title: Lovely, Dark, and Deep
MPAA Rating: Not Yet Rated
Director: Teresa Sutherland
Starring: Georgina Campbell, Wai Ching Ho, Nick Blood
Runtime: 1 hr 27 mins

What it is: A new park ranger, Ranger Lennon, (Georgina Campbell) accepts a job at national park where her sister went missing when they were children. While secretly searching for evidence of her sister’s whereabouts, she discovers a dark secret about the forest. One that threatens to make her disappear too.

What We Think: This film was an excellent indie psychological horror film. When your biggest thing holding you back as a movie is a need for a bigger budget, but you defy those odds, you have succeeded as an indie film. I honestly think that Blumhouse could take a few lessons from movies like this. A trend lately with bigger studio horror films that are not A24 tends to be over-explaining the monster. A lot of modern horror movies show too much of their hand and don’t leave enough mystery. The oldest human fear is fear of the unknown and this movie did that very well. I had the biggest damn smile during certain sequences in this movie. Somebody studied their genre while writing this and I could tell.

Now, that being said, some of the scares didn’t work as well as others. I won’t spoil anything but certain scares maybe needed another draft or two to really bring the terror. I would likely say some of these were budget related, but it wasn’t enough to seriously affect any enjoyment of this movie.  For the most part, this movie kicked ass, took names, and was genuinely creepy which is a big thing a lot of modern horror movies end up not achieving. For the genre? We need more horror movies like this one.

This movie is really likable. Georgina Campbell is an absolutely fantastic actress and really brings this whole movie together. Without her casting, even with the awesome writing, I’m not sure this movie would have held up as well. So much of the movie relies on her interactions with the world around her and is very much all her.

The cinematography is beautiful, the story is unpredictable, and the horror is genuinely unsettling. The ending, which can make or break a horror film, is also pretty solid too.

Our Grade: A, despite some budget constraints, I think this movie was a solid horror flick. One I definitely would rewatch. The acting on Campbell’s part was phenomenal and I think the script was very well written. Blumhouse, take notes please.