Studio: XYZ Films
Director: Mitchell Altieri
Writer: David Calbert
Producer: Jeffrey Allard, Mitchell Altieri, Phil Flores, Joel Pincosy
Stars: Courtney Halverson, Mark Famiglietti, Devon Sawa
Review Score:
Summary:
A married couple crosses paths with a vengeful hunter as they face off against a supernatural shapeshifter while camping in the woods.
Review:
"Consumed" faces dueling dilemmas. The filmmakers have to hop the first hurdle. Trouble is, by doing so, they put up a second obstacle for viewers to vault over, yet the movie doesn't offer much motivation for a disengaged audience to find the legs required to make that leap.
"Consumed" features only three main actors. It's also mostly a single-location affair, although that single location is an expansive forest as opposed to an ordinary house or something similarly simple. Then the script has a no-frills plot that's easy to follow, and relatively easy to shoot, too.
Indie filmmakers working with low budgets and limited resources are supposed to follow a pragmatic plan like that. They're supposed to stay within their means, minimizing potential pitfalls by keeping the cast small, the set controllable, and the scope tight so they don't need bombastic spectacles, extensive CGI, or other bells and whistles beyond their capacity to convincingly create.
The problem this presents, however, is viewers are left to gnaw on the skeleton of an emaciated thriller without much meat on its sun-bleached bones. Double that potential for disappointment for any well-traveled cinephiles who've already trekked through their fair share of survivalist setups, mediocre monster movies, and all of the other trope-filled trees "Consumed" uses to plant routine roots.
Conspicuous close-ups on their wedding rings loudly announce Jay and Beth are married. To mark the one-year anniversary of Beth's breast cancer being in remission, and to start getting their rocky relationship back on track, Jay could have chosen from any number of romantic getaway options, but he settled on roughing it in the woods instead. In between calm chinwags, the couple gets creeped out by the carcass of a skinned bear, the sound of distant gunfire, and slime-soaked footprints on the forest floor. Eeriness then escalates to a whole new level when a creature forms out of mysterious mist, forcing Beth and Jay to flee in fright.
Of course, no nighttime sprint in a horror movie would be complete without someone stumbling or suffering an injury. Jay draws that short straw, triggering an animal trap that tears into his leg, breaking the bone. Determined to get help for her husband, Beth ventures forward alone. First she finds a collection of human skins collected by the monster. Next she finds a hunter named Quinn, who might be the hope she's desperate for.
Quinn escorts Beth and Jay back to an underground bunker he fortuitously found or apparently built who knows when or how. There, Quinn tells the two stranded campers the creature is a shapeshifting wendigo with the power to possess people, and he's dedicated his life to destroying it ever since it killed his daughter. However, Quinn's unorthodox methods for murdering a cryptid involve putting Beth and Jay in a precarious position, leading them to wonder whether the rock or the hard place poses a bigger threat to their lives.
None of these three people possess more than one characteristic to their singular personalities. Quinn cares only about vengeance and literally nothing else. Jay doesn't have anything going on aside from being a selfish spouse who isn't as sensitive as he should be about his wife's ongoing illness. And Beth is simply a hollow heroine the script never spares a single second for fleshing out in any intriguing way.
"Consumed" tells us absolutely nothing about Beth other than she has cancer. We don't learn what she does/did for a living. We don't hear about her family. She never even mentions how her hospital stays might have impacted a hobby like painting, playing piano, or training for a marathon. Defining someone solely by a disease or a disability is an incredibly inept way of building a character an audience needs to become emotionally attached to, especially when unearned pity is the only possible response. Beth, Jay, and Quinn are created out of only the minimum components necessary to facilitate the basic functions of a story. They clearly have no existence outside of what happens in the 90 minutes of this movie, and there isn't too much happening at all.
Supposed suspense in the thin tension between Beth and Quinn reads as rudimentary at best. Ditto the connection between Beth and her husband, which is so barely visible as to bring into question how these two vanilla vessels somehow bonded together in the first place. A creature feature might be able to overcome two-dimensional humans as long as its monster fulfills the horror quotient, except "Consumed's" wendigo spends a lot of its time as swirling smoke, cheating viewers out of tangible terrors that might have shaken them from the slumber imposed by snoozy sequences of walking, talking, and touring the New Jersey woods where the movie was filmed.
It's clear why people produce B-movies that take place in spooky woods and star only a handful of actors. Their patterns plug smoothly into charts for financers looking for films to invest in, PR people who can reuse previous marketing campaigns, and filmmakers anxious for a project with achievable aims. It's harder to fathom why any of those parties think moviegoers want to watch another predictable yarn populated by people who puff, pant, and struggle their way through a fright-filled forest. "Consumed" is an empty experience I could have passed up without any material change in my life, as there's no notable difference between never seeing a particular movie and forgetting all about it mere moments after end credits roll.
Review Score: 35
At a time when so many indie horror hucksters are still shoving "Amityville" into their titles, it's inspiring to see Curry Barker putting in real work with an original effort.