The Wild

After the death of a friend, a tight-knit group of friends decide to try to reconnect by resuming their annual camping trip. But things grow increasingly strange and uncomfortable in the isolated forest, as the rifts in their relationships widen, and their friendships begin to unravel... for good.

Finn, Lucey, and Emilia‘s lives were all disrupted after the fourth member of their group, Bea, died while they were on their beloved annual group getaway camping trip. In the time since, all three have struggled, not just with their own grief, but with coming to terms with Bea’s death together and what it means for their group, and because of this, their long-time friendships are slowly dissolving.

Resolved to patch the cracks in their relationships, they decide to continue their treasured yearly camping trip tradition, this time specifically in remembrance of Bea. The trio travel to their traditional spot in the wilderness for these camping trips, the same place Bea died, in the hope of finding comfort and reconnection. Instead, underlying tensions that have been long-simmering in their friendships, brought to the surface by their unresolved feelings about Bea’s death, begin to taint their hope for a healing experience in the isolated woodlands.

When their girls’ trip is interrupted by a man camping in the area, a series of strange events start to make it difficult for the three women to distinguish between paranoia and reality. Soon enough, they find themselves being forced to face their darkest secrets and worst fears as the trust between them completely collapses, the accusations and recriminations fly, and soon enough... there are some violent consequences.

Okay, so first of all...

One of the main ways this trio plans on “honoring” their dead friend Bea is to head out to the deep wilderness and build some cairns. Rock Cairns are small piles of rocks stacked on top of each other to create a little tower. You usually come across them on rocky shores, or on hiking trails, or along rivers.

But while this may seem like a harmless and cute little piece of personal artistic expression, and it’s definitely a beloved photo of the Instagram set, Rock Cairns can be bad for the environment, and you simply shouldn’t do it. In fact, unless they’re clearly being used as trail markers, you should kick over any Rock Cairns you come across in the wild, as moving rocks and stacking them can disturb the natural habitat of tiny creatures.

On rocky shores, the crabs, molluscs, and algae, can depend on the rocks for shelter and protection. By moving and stacking rocks, you may be inadvertently destroying their homes, not to mention harming their populations. The same can be said for insect populations and moss in wilderness areas, not to mention the erosion and destabilization of soil structures you can be contributing to, which can then negatively impact any aquatic habitats in nearby bodies of water, as well as water quality in general.

And all for what, a basic-bitch cliched pic for the ‘gram? Fuck you.

I’m not a big hiking or a camping person, I prefer a nice hotel, a fun local cultural experience, and then maybe a movie and a drink later, but still even I know, if you must go out there and tromp around in nature, then there’s one rule…

Leave no trace.

Anyway...

Not to be confused with the shocking amount of other movies that are called “The Wild,” this film stands out mostly due to the very large amount of dread in it. In fact, it’s fair to say that this film is almost nothing but dread…

But that dread mostly goes nowhere.

The Wild is filled to the brim with red herrings and innuendos, all of which indicate that it’s going to be a certain kind of horror film, a "vengeful ghost in the woods, or an angry forest god, or unknown spores drive us crazy" kind of thing, but in actuality, it’s caught somewhere between being a “psychological” horror and a rumination on unresolved grief and anger in the wake of a tragedy and how this can affect family units story, and as a result of this conflict of identities, it ends up being neither of those things, and only seems like a confused half-effort.

It’s clear that The Wild intended to be an exploration of the kind of “everyday” horrors that can exist in a once close relationships that has now begun to fray, and then taking that normal shit and making it worse by letting it loose to run “wild” in a claustrophobic and isolated setting such as the deep dark woods. It’s also clear that the woods are meant to be seen in this story as both a beloved place that has now become something threatening, and at the same time, as a metaphor of the characters' relationships, which is also a beloved place that has become something threatening. I get that. It’s clear that this is what was being attempted.

It just doesn’t come together at all.

Between the brief and broad glimpses of the women’s regular lives outside of the wilderness, as both prologue and denouement, as well as everything that happens in the wilderness… it all seems disconnected to itself, and generally underserved. The film clearly believes that these bookend "real world" glimpses are informing us of who these characters are, and in the denouement specifically, how this trip then changed them, and yet it’s not clear what the film thinks it’s saying about each of the characters and their fates, especially when taken in consideration with the rest of the events in the film. There's almost a full story. It's heavily implied at least, but it's unearned and incomplete. It's hard to tell if important parts were left out, or if they were just not fleshed out enough, or if they were just plain old poorly told.

Or maybe all three...

And this is especially evident at the point in the story when the characters’ paranoia and breakdowns all ratchet up too suddenly and too quickly. It's too out-of-left-field, too overblown. It makes the characters come off as too unreliable for us to know which of their stories we’re supposed to latch onto, or who we should trust. Worse than that, we don’t know why we shouldn’t trust any of them either. It all becomes even more muddled when it becomes clear that, despite the nonsense dead-end supernatural red herrings, this is just a story of three adult women who are dealing with their grief very poorly, and then for some reason, it all goes off the rails. Why? It’s not clear whether or not any of them are really unsure whether or not one of them is actually a killer, or if they’re maybe just tripping balls big time, or if this is some kind of shared mental breakdown...? I don't know, None of it follows in any kind of way that makes sense.

All of this makes The Wild a puzzling film when it comes to what it's trying to say, which makes it a frustrating watch.

This whole project feels like it never really came together at any stage of production, and yet, for some reason, it was forced to keep going. It feels like, because it was the first project of first time writer/director Jessica Kozak to get traction, and because the dream of seeing it realized on the silver screen was a dragon she had chased for so long, long past the point where she should’ve maybe just moved on to something else, she just didn't know how to let go. Watching this film, it's clear that the whole issue is that the script was simply rewritten too many times, tinkered with too many times, all over the course of too many years, and due to these constant revisions and reworkings, at some point, it lost sight of its original vision, that its forest basically vanished in all the trees.

If that's the case, I don’t know how Kozak was able to somehow will this project into being, maybe there's some Hollywood nepo-baby shit lurking around this one, but whatever happened, the end result is this Frankenstein‘s monster of a script, a mangled and wretched-looking abomination of what was once one of God’s purest creations, was allowed to lumber out in front of the camera, lugging with it a string of long past their sell date ideas, all these awful little darlings that really should’ve been curb-stomped long ago, just to lead to an ending that is at once both obvious and also confusing, with very few thrills, or anything interesting happening, along the way. It's just a confused collage of half-ideas and poor execution.

It doesn’t work.

And that’s too bad, because it otherwise looks good, and I like the cast. Especially Sunita Mani.

This one is a pass.