Director – Renny Harlin, Screenplay – Vikram Weet, Producers – Sergei Bespalov, Renny Harlin, Kia Jam, Sergei Melkumov & Alexander Rodnyansky, Photography – Denis Alarcon Ramirez, Music – Yuri Poteyenko, Visual Effects Supervisor – James McQuaide, Visual Effects – Celluloid Visual Effects (Supervisor – Justin Daneman), Digital District (Supervisor – Thomas Duval), Furious FX, Look Effects, Inc. (Supervisor – Derek Bird), Special Effects Supervisor – Ilya Churinov, Makeup Effects – Illusion Industries Inc. (Supervisor – Todd Tucker), Creature Design – Aaron Sims Company, Production Design – Feodor Saveliev. Production Company – Alexander Rodnyansky/Non-Stop Productions/Midnight Sun Pictures/K.Jam Media.
Cast
Holly Goss (Holly King), Matt Stokoe (Jenson Day), Luke Albright (JP Hauser Jr.), Ryan Hawley (Andy Thatcher), Gemma Atkinson (Denise Evers), Nikolay Butenin (Sergei)
Plot
At the University of Oregon, Holly King obtains a grant to make a documentary about the Dyatlov Pass Incident. In 1959, a team of Russia explorers were camped on a mountainside in the Northern Urals but were mysteriously all found dead and wearing little clothing. There has been no adequate explanation for what happened. Holly assembles a crew of videographers and climbers and travels to Russia. As they ascend the same mountainside and set up camp, mysterious things start occurring.
The Dyatlov Pass Incident is a real-life happening that has accrued a good deal of unexplained mystery and conspiracy theory around it. What is known is that in the Soviet Union in February 1959, a nine-person hiking expedition set out into the Ural Mountains led by engineering student Igor Dyatlov. None of them returned. A subsequent expedition found their camp on the mountainside of Kholat Syakhl (Dead Mountain). The camp still contained their equipment and clothing, including their shoes, while the tent appeared to have been cut open from inside. Their bodies were found some distance away in their underwear with bare feet, where they had been killed by hypothermia. An investigation in 2020 laid the official cause as being an avalanche, although there is debate for and against this claim. Other more fanciful claims have involved everything from Soviet experimental sonic weapons or that they were killed to cover up having witnessed such, or attack by local tribes, alien abduction and the Yeti.
Finnish born director Renny Harlin first appeared in the US with his third and fourth films, Prison (1987) and A Nightmare on Elm Street IV: The Dream Master (1988), and then gained a modest degree of respectability with Die Hard 2 (1990). Throughout the 1990s, Harlin made his name on loud and mindlessly spectacular action films like Cliffhanger (1993), CutThroat Island (1995), The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) and Driven (2001). The last three in particular were box-office flops. Towards the end of the decade and into the millennium, Harlin seemed to demonstrate a predilection for genre material with the likes of the ridiculously entertaining killer shark movie Deep Blue Sea (1999), the universally derided Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), the serial killer thriller Mindhunters (2004) and the supernatural horror The Covenant (2006). None of these are very good films.
Renny Harlin’s career as a director of big-budget Hollywood spectacle seemed to dry up in the 2010s and he has been forced to look wider afield for funding for projects – such as with the independently made The Legend of Hercules (2014) or heading to China for Legend of the Ancient Sword (2018) and Skiptrace (2021). In the case of The Dyatlov Pass Incident, the film comes with Russian backing. It is still cast with American actors and shot in English, although Harlin and crew actually have gone on location to shoot in Russia using a number of Russian crew.
Holly Goss leads a group of filmmakers up the mountainside
The Dyatlov Pass Incident is a strange unexplained mystery, although it is one that in all likelihood has fairly mundane explanations – the one where the tent becoming buried under an unexpected snow build-up from above and the asleep climbers were forced to cut their way out seems a plausible one to me. However, this being the film it is, it raises all of these everyday explanations and then dismisses them out of hand in the opening scene and then makes a beeline for Fringe Science explanations about Yeti, mysterious creatures, Soviet military experiments and government cover-ups.
The Dyatlov Pass Incident is essentially Renny Harlin making his own version of The Blair Witch Project (1999). It is not entirely a Found Footage film – the camerawork throughout varies between Found Footage camera point-of-view and regular dramatic set-ups. That said, the film borrows the essential set-up from Blair Witch of a group of students with cameras wandering into a mysterious mountainside instead of a mysterious woods in search of the myth that surrounds the place and falling afoul of the menace that lies there.
Thereafter the two films diverge but for a good two-thirds of its running time, Harlin follows the Blair Witch basics. It does end up being one of the better-budgeted Found Footage films with Harlin at one point shooting in the midst of a full avalanche. Once we enter the bunker, the film becomes no more than a regular Monster Movie with various mutant figures running around in a series of tedious and affectless pop-up scares. The end does offer a minor twist in the tale.
