In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

I watched this last Sunday, choosing it deliberately because I knew it would be fairly undemanding and I had been out late the night before. I knew about it because it had been screened at the Starburst Film Festival in 2018, but had clashed with other things that I and the people I was with wanted to see, so I hadn't been able to watch it at the time. However, it was also screened on the Horror Channel not long afterwards, so the recording had been waiting for me on my Sky box for some time.

The main narrative involves a couple called Josh and Beth. Josh is a musician who has recently been diagnosed with leukaemia, so they are doing 'bucket-list' things, which for him includes going on a three-day hike up a mountain to some falls, camping overnight along the way. He and Beth meet two rangers during their hike: one at the start who warns them to stick to the designated public area and not go off the path, and then another part-way up who says he is a 'special' kind of ranger, carries a bag of sharpened wooden stakes, and just casually double-checks with them that they are not planning to go near 'the mausoleum'.

Well, you can see where this is going. Obviously, they go off the path, an action which Josh suggests on the grounds that it will allow them to take a short-cut and therefore have more time at the falls. Once they've done so, scary things start happening. During the day-time they start coming across patches of slimy gore on the forest floor, and at night they begin hearing cries and seeing humanoid figures amongst the trees. By their second night off-piste, what is clearly a vampire (of the ravening predator kind) prowls directly outside their tent, and they have to scare it away with a flare and run for it. They end up at the ranger camp at the top of the mountain, but find only a few scattered remains of the ranger left, and come under attack by a horde of vampires who pull Josh off into the depths of a building, leaving Beth alone and terrified.

So far, so good. We have the classic and often very effective set-up of people dealing with a real-life trauma (Josh's leukaemia) also finding themselves face to face with supernatural terrors, and the two situations mirroring and feeding into one another. Even before the vampires start showing themselves, the tensions in Josh and Beth's relationship are neatly sketched out. She's terrified of losing him, he doesn't really want to give her space to say that and is irritated that she's bringing the mood down on his adventure. And obviously the scarier their situation gets, the more the fragility of their relationship shows up. Meanwhile, the gradual build-up of atmosphere as strange things happen around them is well-paced, and we get some nice scary moments by the time the vampires are stalking them directly.

Then there's a twist. Josh emerges back out of the hole in the wall which the vampires pulled him through (somehow... we'll wave a hand over that), stabs Beth in the neck with a tranquilliser, and drags her to the mausoleum at the heart of the vampire infestation. Through a combination of dialogue from him explaining to her what he's doing and a pre-credits scene with a different couple which it all suddenly make sense of, we learn the truth behind their little adventure.

It turns out that Josh knew perfectly well about the mausoleum all along. What it actually is is something more like a temple, where if a terminally-ill person sacrifices a loved one in front of a sort of tangled, organic-looking icon, they will be cured. We see him slashing Beth's neck, drinking liquid which then drips forth from the icon, and returning back to their SUV to phone his producer, who had found out about the miracle cure in the first place from 'a woman online' and encouraged Josh to do it. He unwraps a bandage around his hand from a cut he had sustained during the hike, revealing that it has healed and therefore that the miracle cure has worked. Meanwhile, back in the mausoleum / temple, we see Beth shock back to life, now as another one of the vampires which haunt it.

I think this would have seemed like a pretty disappointing ending even before COVID. We see Josh looking a little bit weighed down with guilt at what he has done to Beth, but other than that he just drives off having got exactly what he wanted, with no ill effects, at the cost of her life. It would have been so much better if, when he unwound the bandage, the wound was just as bad as before if not festering a bit, showing that he had been lured to such extreme lengths by the promise of a quack cure which had proved illusory. And post-COVID, in a world where people are actually taking horse dewormer rather than vaccines because of online disinformation, it seems not just a little underweight as an ending but actively dangerous.

And, as if that's not enough, the movie also suffers from a serious 'fridge moment' plot-hole. As Josh gets back into their SUV alone and drives off from the mountain, we see the ranger they had previously met with the wooden stakes, observing him and reporting into a hand-held radio that they've got 'another one, the woman'. This reveals that he knows not only that the woods are full of vampires but also that people are regularly turning up and murdering their partners in the mausoleum / temple. Indeed, since we've seen Beth turning into a vampire after the sacrifice and a crowd of at least a dozen other vampires running around the woods, we can deduce that it must have happened at least a dozen times before. If that's really the case, the rangers should be doing a lot more than just warning people not to stray from the track: sealing off or even blowing up the mausoleum might seem like an obvious first step.

So, in the end the ending just wrecks the whole thing, and presumably explains why it has a catastrophically poor rating on any internet review-aggregator site you might care to consult. Still, for character development and building tension along the way, it is not actually as bad as those scores might suggest. Good enough for a brainless Sunday evening watch, anyway.