Backcountry movie review & film summary (2015)
The movie opens with Attractive Young Canadian People Alex (Jeff Roop) and Jenn (Missy Peregrym) bantering as they drive to a wilderness destination. She’s jokingly reading from a “rate your boyfriend” feature in a magazine; he’s asking if “can start a fire without matches” is among the quiz’s criteria. Once parked, Alex commits the first of many mishaps by refusing the map offer. While Alex looks at Jenn as being a bit too buttoned-up (she’s a lawyer and stuff), he is committed to the idea of impressing her with all manner of Canuck Tarzan stuff, which he intends to climax by proposing marriage.
Best-laid plans continue to go awry. Jenn’s not to enthusiastic about skinny dipping in the old swimming hole. A little later, as he’s chopping wood, Alex hears voices; why, it’s Jenn speaking to some buff Irish fellow named Brad (Eric Balfour) who describes himself as a wilderness guide. That we meet this fellow in the middle of his conversation with the female member of the couple is one of director MacDonald’s not-unfamiliar directorial feints. What’s this interloper going to bring to the party? Well, fresh fish, for one thing. Sequences of shots that indirectly juxtapose Alex and Jenn’s shiny newly-purchased camping equipment with the messy business of fish-gutting convey a sense of disorder that can’t be tamed. Later, sitting by the fire, Alex stammers when the stately, studly Brad asks him how he makes a living. “Right now my buddy has a landscaping business…”
Oh dear. One gets the uneasy feeling that the movie is working up some kind of allegorical statement on the Condition Of Contemporary Masculinity, and a certain species of sexual tension is evoked when Brad utters the line “Let’s see the potatoes.” These considerations are magically transformed into red herrings, though, once a big hungry bear shows up. After which it’s arrgh, ugh, and ick time. MacDonald can’t be faulted in his use of special effects, judiciously dropped-out sound, and other varieties of cinematic eloquence in conveying pretty unspeakable grisliness. After which there is flight, and pursuit, and a lot of widescreen compositions in which a pursued character is scrunched into the left side of the frame, the better to give the viewer a panorama of whatever beast might pop up from behind that character.
