Director/Story Development – Rodrigo Gudiño, Screenplay – Craig Davidson & Ian Weir, Based on the Short Story The Breach (2020) by Nick Cutter, Producers – Andrew Thomas Hunt & Michael Paszt & Pasha Patriki, Photography – Eric Oh, Music – Slash, Visual Effects – Northern Light & Colour & Purpledog Post, Special Effects – Nexus Canada SPFX (Supervisor – James Sled), Makeup Effects Design – Daniel Baker, Production Design – Jim Goddall. Production Company – Hangar 18 Media.
Cast
Allan Hawco (John Hawkins), Emily Alatalo (Meg Fullbright), Natalie Brown (Linda Parsons), Adam Kenneth Wilson (Cole Parsons), Wesley French (Jacob Redgrave), Mary Antonini (Connie Parks), Alex Lifeson (Alex), Ava Weiss (Isabelle Parsons)
Plot
A canoe turns up on a beach in the small Canadian town of Lone Crow. Inside are the remains of a human body that have been utterly shredded. Police chief John Hawkins investigates. The remains are found to belong to physics professor Cole Parsons. Hawkins joins his ex, the wilderness guide Meg Fulbright, as they head up river to Parsons’ last known location at Link’s Creek to investigate. There they find a house with a strange apparatus built in the attic. Parsons’ wife Linda turns up, having been searching for their missing daughter, and then a seemingly unharmed Parsons. At the same time, it appears that are strange mutations in the area and that the machine in the attic may be a portal that leads to other quantum realms.
Rodrigo Gudiño is best known as the founder and editor of Rue Morgue magazine, a horror prozine that has been published from Toronto since 1997. This has created a number of spinoffs including Rue Morgue Radio, a radio program/podcast and the Rue Morgue Festival of Fear convention that began in 2004. Gudiño directed three short films The Eyes of Edward James (2006), The Demonology of Desire (2007) and The Facts in the Case of Mister Hollow (2009), before making his feature-length debut with the cryptic ghost story The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012). In addition, Gudiño has produced the films Minutes Past Midnight (2016), Galaxy of Horrors (2017) and Blood, Sweat and Terrors (2018). The Breach was Gudiño’s second feature-length film as director. He adapts a 2020 short story by Canadian horror writer Nick Cutter (a pseudonym for Craig Davidson, who co-writes the screenplay under his given name).
In The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh, Rodrigo Gudiño revealed himself as a devotee of the slow build. The Breach is a more regular paced film, nevertheless there is still that same sense of slow build as we watch – where shadows on the roof may not quite be what they seem, where the camera remains focused on the main room of the cabin after everyone has left before the door ominously shuts of its own accord. For much of the early sections, something ominous seems perpetually on the verge of happening.
Allan Hawco investigates the cabin in the woods
The film creates a good deal of mystery with enigmatically teased hints – the shredded corpse in the canoe but the missing scientist then turning up alive at the cabin, the machine in the attic, bodily mutations including Adam Kenneth Wilson displaying a six-fingered hand – and more than effectively builds a mystery. Eventually, The Breach builds into a Lovecraftian Film – not any direct adaptation but drawing on the same themes of experiments in forbidden science, the occult, portals that shouldn’t be being opened with disastrous consequences for the opener, and something from beyond emerged.
The film reaches an end where what has happened is still not clearly spelled out. We get hints throughout from talk of the Mandela Effect and Alex Lifeson, the guitarist for Canadian band Rush, turning up, coming out with lines like “Have you heard about CERN? They do black magic there,” which pushes the Lovecraftian elements into a weird conspiracy theory territory. The not knowing exactly what is going becomes all the more unsettling when it comes to the film’s final scene.
The Breach should not be confused with the Bruce Willis film Breach (2020) about a space crew facing parasitic creatures.
