Canada. 2022.
Crew
Director/Screenplay – Berkley Brady, Story – Berkley Brady & Tim Cairo, Producers – Berkley Brady & Michael Peterson, Photography – Jaryl Lim, Music – Ghostkeeper, Visual Effects – Gamon YYC (Supervisor – Kenji EJ Rodriguez-Tamachi), Makeup Effects – Kyra MacPherson, Production Design – Myron Hyrak. Production Company – Dread/Telefilm Canada/Super Channel/The Indigenous Screen Office/Peterson Polaris Corp/Nika Productions/Almost Forever Productions Corp.
Cast
Hannah Anderson (Joy), Madison Walsh (Carmen), Helen Belay (Tara), Roseanne Supernault (Shaina), Kyra Harper (Dr Carol Dunnley), Daniel Arnold (Derek), Luke Moore (Creature)
Plot
Joy joins her friend Carmen and two others on a hike into the wilderness led by Dr Carol Dunnley for the purposes of group therapy. The intention is to deal with their issues in the wild but Joy is haunted by trauma over the violence exhibited by her ex-boyfriend Derek. While in the wild, the group are stalked and attacked by a creature.
Dark Nature advertises itself as the first Metis film. The Metis are a recognised indigenous group within Canada – the descendants of native Indians who interbred with European (primarily French) settlers. The majority of the Metis groups live in the prairie provinces in the middle of the country. The end credits come with a long list of thanks to the tribal groups that contributed to the film. The film is a feature-length debut for Berkley Brady, a half-Metis director from Calgary who had made assorted short films throughout the 2010s, and subsequently went onto make the horror film Creepypasta (2023).
I began to quite like Dark Nature as it started. The initial set-up of a group of women venturing out into the wilderness on a New Agey navel-gazing exercise did nothing for me. On the other hand, the characterisations of the women is done with a deft hand and the characters tempered with a certain cynicism. What works particularly well here is Berkley Brady’s conjuration of nature as a physical presence. Brady and her cinematographer Jryl Lim are particularly good at showing the sometimes ominous and threatening physical presence of the wilderness, which becomes something the characters project their fears onto.
Dark Nature is essentially made as a festival film – at which it does well, providing an indigenous focus and placing women and their issues at the forefront of the story. On the other hand, its eventual destination was screening on the Shudder streaming service. When you look at Dark Nature from the framework of Shudder’s specialty – the horror film – it works far less effectively, especially when you consider it as a Monster Movie. This side of things feels severely underdeveloped.
The first half is the girls and their issues in the wilderness; the second half has them attacked by a creature and forced into a fight for survival. This latter half is okay and Berkley Brady directs many of these scenes with reasonable tension. However, what the creature is is left entirely unexplained and this creates a substantial gap in the horror side of the film. It’s a film that feels unbalanced – more focused on the character side of things where the monster is there only as an afterthought.
Trailer here