By the time this film reaches its closing message about accepting yourself without shame, it has given me a pretty serious reason to question what, exactly, it wants me to forgive. In the final act, the main character admits to pursuing an underage boy. The movie moves past that admission with a casualness and generosity I couldn’t accept. Whatever patience I still had for this low-budget gay supernatural horror film largely disappeared there.
That ending is especially frustrating because the idea underneath it has potential: use a haunting to explore a queer relationship, with two men’s unresolved pain supplying the psychological unease. There’s an effort to give the characters emotional weight, and the film establishes a suitably gloomy mood. But its handling of shame was already losing me before that last stretch. I read much of it as shame over how long these men had taken to accept their sexuality; why that should connect to an uncle’s wandering ghost never felt convincing.
The relationship begins on an app. Albert is a middle-aged English teacher, married and still in the closet. Devon, a younger paramedic, has settled into a quiet habit of pursuing married men whose lives leave no room for him to have them completely. Their messages become heated, and they arrange to explore the attraction at Albert’s remote family cabin during the off season.
It’s the sort of invitation that makes horror-movie judgment look as shaky as ever. People in these films will investigate a dark corner of a house they have no business entering; apparently, heading into the middle of nowhere because some stranger from a gay dating app suggested it belongs to the same school of decision-making. At a certain point, you’ve practically booked the trouble yourself.
Initially, the visit consists of conversation, drinks and stories about their earlier lives. Yet neither man feels entirely comfortable. Each separately notices a shadowy presence, and each dismisses what he’s seen. Then there’s the history of the property: Albert inherited it from his uncle, who died by suicide inside the cabin. As the apparent haunting takes hold and time begins behaving strangely, the men have to confront wounds and trauma they’ve avoided for years. Their attempt to leave gets them nowhere because neither car will start, and the water supply has stopped as well. Their secluded retreat becomes a prison, with guilt, shame and buried pain taking frightening forms.
The setting does a considerable amount of work. An isolated cabin hardly needs much help to feel sinister, and the film makes effective use of it despite its limited budget. There are genuinely scary manifestations of what these men carry with them. The two actors also handle their material competently. With essentially only two people onscreen, though, the writing needed considerably more substance to sustain almost two hours.
Instead, scenes continue after their purpose is clear, and the middle repeatedly revisits emotional territory without meaningfully developing either the characters or the horror. I kept waiting for the accumulating discomfort to become tension; too often, it became another round of the same material. The running time feels far longer than it should.
I was willing to make allowances for a modest production with a worthwhile foundation, even as it dragged. The final act exhausted that goodwill. Horror isn’t generally my genre anyway, and a gay horror film this pretentious has to offer considerably more to win me over. The atmosphere and intentions couldn’t carry it past the thin script, repetition and deeply unpersuasive finish. 3.5/10