By SHAWN MACOMBER
Starring Georgina Campbell, Nick Blood and Wai Ching Ho
Written and directed by Teresa Sutherland
XYZ Films
A little over a decade ago, the prolific (and frequently contrarian) writer Joyce Carol Oates penned a piece of short fiction for Harper’s Magazine entitled “Lovely, Dark, Deep,” in which she imagined a young writer making a pilgrimage to the home of the beloved, aging New England poet Robert Frost—only to meet a man who is considerably more sinister and lascivious than his reputation as a gimlet-eyed chronicler of rural life would suggest. While the story had some basis in research, the post-mortem befoulment under a title that subversively repurposed lines of the seminal Frost poem “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” was, to put it mildly, controversial. (The New Republic article was unsubtly headlined “Joyce Carol Oates Has Written Something Outrageous About Robert Frost.“)
I bring all this up because writer/director Teresa Sutherland may have appropriated the same Frost stanza for the title of her feature debut, but the line between beauty and darkness is much less defined in her beguiling, ethereal and, at times, extremely unsettling vision than Oates’ grimy, corporeal alternative history.
In Sutherland’s LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP, we meet Lennon (Georgina Campbell of BARBARIAN and BLACK MIRROR), a newly minted ranger working the isolated backlands of a gorgeous but dense national park. We soon learn that when she was a child, her sister disappeared in these very woods—and though she might have ulterior motives of solving that mystery, the forest is not done swallowing people up. The ghosts are not done hiking up from the Great Beyond into the land of the living (?), an ancient curse might very well be afoot and Lennon’s fellow rangers (played by Nick Blood and Wai Ching Ho) may or may not be accomplices in that aforementioned curse’s plans.
Or is it all in Lennon’s head?
The resulting film often feels like a fractured kaleidoscope of surrealist, nightmarish images—think the end sequences of Kubrick’s THE SHINING or Lynch’s MULLHOLLAND DR. reset in a national park (which, like the former’s Overlook Hotel, is its own separate character). The good news here is, first, that Sutherland, who cut her teeth writing Emma Tammi’s 2019 feature THE WIND and episodes of Mike Flanagan’s 2021 miniseries MIDNIGHT MASS (and talks about this movie here), understands how to give Lennon and the film a grounding pathos even as the last strands of sanity and reality fray. Second, lead actress Campbell, who must essentially carry 90 percent of the film on her own is a stellar and nuanced enough actress to make us not only suspend our disbelief during this descent into madness, but care enough not to become overwhelmed and detached because of the sheer volume of nuttiness.
Did I, by the time the credits rolled, fully understand what I had just witnessed? Not exactly. I couldn’t quite tell you which of the film’s characters are living, ghost or ghoul–or, for that matter, to separate what took place in the gloom of the woods from what transpired in the darkness of Lennon’s psyche.
But that may not be the point. What LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP truly communicates is much more primal: that once you get away from the constructs and buffers of modern life–to the places where, as one character puts it, you can still see the stars–you realize how vast and indecipherable nature, the world, the universe truly are. When we expose our piddling lifespan and limited brain, with its need to contextualize everything for immediate survival, into that mix, there is a reckoning with transcendence and mystery that is no walk in the park.
