Director/Screenplay/Photography – Scott Lambson, Music – Daniel Angelus. Production Company – Stone Chapel Films.
Lenni Uitto (Bruce Winterson), Stacey Ann Turner (Alison Hollister), Ricardo Costa (Juan Carlos), Ethan Kartchner (Taylor)
Bruce is a loner who works as a pilot in the Arctic Circle. In a bar, he meets Alison who has come up there with her colleague Carlos in search of her missing father. Bruce and Alison connect but she departs in the morning on her expedition. Bruce then hears over the radio an emergency call that they have been injured. He flies up to their location and finds Carlos in a tent with a broken leg. Carlos tells of their having discovered an entrance in the hollow earth where they were attacked by creatures. Bruce ventures in through the entrance to find Alison. There they come under attack by the creatures that live in the In Between.
Arctic Hollow was the fourth film for Utah-based director Scott Lambson. Lambson had previously made the documentary Where It’s Still a Game (2003), the wilderness survival film Into the Soul (2020) and the SF film Mr. Earth (2022). Arctic Hollow would be Lambson’s final film and he passed away in 2024, aged 47.
The capsule premise for Arctic Hollow intrigued me: “An Alaskan bush pilot attempts a daring rescue of a stranded researcher deep inside an arctic cave system thought to be an entrance to the inner earth, only to find himself battling creatures not of this world.” The Hollow Earth is an idea that turns up with semi-regularity in genre material, along with the Symmes Hole (an entrance that was believed to exist in the Arctic). It is a scientifically absurd one – gravity would just cause any hollowed out crust to collapse inward – but it keeps coming back in films ranging from Unknown World (1951), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) and At the Earth’s Core (1976) to most recently Iron Sky: The Coming Race (2019), Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024). (See Centre of the Earth and Underground Adventures).
Arctic Hollow gives the impression that it was shot on minimal (for which read shoestring) resources. Before we head underground, the action takes place in a house (which is empty of furniture), a tent and a bar that looks as though a set has simply been constructed out of a single wall with a whiteboard placed against it. There are a handful of outdoor shots and that is it. This minimalist setting becomes particularly inadequate when we arrive at the Hollow Earth – or The In Between as the film calls it, which makes you think that Scott Lambson has watched too much of tv’s Stranger Things (2016-25).
Where the capsule description leads you expect to see an amazing underground realm opened up where we see the characters exploring it; the reality of what we get feels like a series of scenes that have been filmed in a garage or warehouse that has been completely darkened except for the torchlight from the characters’ caving helmets. Even the scenes where Lenni Uitto and Stacey Ann Turner fall down a rocky slope or tunnels are all shot in medium closeup above the waist with the two actors rocking about but where we never see any sides of the tunnel. There are very occasional scenes where we see the two of them move against a rock face of some type but almost all of the underground scenes seem to take place in this darkened room.
Even so, you have the small hope that maybe Arctic Hollow could have worked as a low-budget version of one of the underground horrors like The Cave (2005) or The Descent (2005). However, even this is subject to corner-cutting where the scenes with the attacking creatures are shot in shakycam with momentary glimpses where it looks as though someone has thrown in a bunch of closeups of dog canines. The film does come to an end, which breaks through into the Hollow Earth where we get an okay effects shot of pyramids and flying machines in the sky (and apparently some kind of sun inside the Earth that is making everything daylight rather than the complete darkness you would get), before an abrupt fadeout without any explanation.
Trailer here