By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Dana Berger and Max Woertendyke
Written and directed by Dane Elcar
Cinephobia Releasing
Being lost in dark woods has been a staple situation in horror movies throughout the history of the genre, but BRIGHTWOOD (now on VOD and DVD) demonstrates that you can creep out a viewer when the sun is shining on the trees too. Writer/director Dane Elcar’s debut feature is a fine and consistently involving example of what an astute filmmaker can do with very limited resources but a well-judged script and a pair of strong performances.
It’s a very nice day for a run when we come upon Jen (Dana Berger) and Dan (Max Woertendyke) doing just that on a typical suburban day, though the dynamic between them is anything but pleasant. She’s upset about his boorish, drunken behavior at a party the night before, and this is far from the first issue between them, if the program about “how to deal with a strained marriage” that she’s listening to on her AirPods is any indication. Jen decides to take a jog around a secluded pond and couldn’t care less if Dan follows her, but follow her he does, alternating between trying to make amends and overly defensive behavior. Then he gets hit with a sudden headache that has nothing to do with being hung over, and so does she, and things start to get weird.
It’s to the credit of both Elcar and his two leads that although they’re verbally at each other’s throats from the get-go, watching them doesn’t become a turnoff, and we remain involved enough with them that we feel first their confusion and then their fear when their situation becomes wonky. The early details of their plight are familiar genre tropes: The trail that would lead them home disappears, attempts to escape the forest result in them winding up back where they started, they lose cell reception. It’s the specific way they react that distinguishes BRIGHTWOOD; when Dan responds to the latter issue with “I told you we never should have changed providers,” it offers a hint about one of the ongoing problems with their relationship.
Jen and Dan may be stuck wandering in circles, but Elcar isn’t; as much as he’s telling a story of the couple’s increasingly desperate and frightening circumstances, he’s also charting the way it impacts their interaction with each other. By the half-hour mark, as the seriousness of their predicament sinks in, Jen in particular starts to go a little crazy, and their past differences become less important as they try to figure out how to deal with their current plight. The mystery deepens as strange hooded figures begin to turn up, first in the distance, and then close enough to be potential threats–or perhaps, Jen and Dan hope, the key to finding their way home. Elcar even elicits some effective humor from one such encounter, which doesn’t end the way you might expect it to.
There are bursts of splatter during the second half of BRIGHTWOOD as well, though obviously, given the limited ensemble, this isn’t a body-count flick. Rather, Elcar keeps peeling back fresh layers of this narrative onion, keeping you guessing about where it’s all headed and whether the couple will successfully survive it, and employs recurring totems and dialogue that help ground the events as they spin toward surreal territory. The same also goes for Elcar’s naturalistic cinematography–the unnerving developments seem even more so for taking place in such a sylvan setting–and the score by Jason Cook and Elcar and Joey Zampella’s sound design also do a lot for the atmosphere. BRIGHTWOOD does a lot with a little, and it should be very interesting to see where Elcar, as well as his two leads, travel from here.
