Director: Teresa Sutherland
Writer: Teresa Sutherland
Stars: Georgina Campbell, Nick Blood, Wai Ching Ho
Synopsis: Lennon, a new back-country ranger, travels alone through the dangerous wilderness, hoping to uncover the origins of a tragedy that has haunted her since she was a child.
The first mistake Robert Frost made when he approached the infamous “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” was entering the woods in the first place. Nothing good happens in the woods. Those who disagree are either not of this world or superior beings to us normies. John Muir is one of those people; the naturalist author, who created the National Parks System, wrote a great deal about the beauty of nature and its mysteries. He once wrote, “And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”
That passage, which appears at the beginning of Teresa Sutherland’s directorial debut, Lovely, Dark, and Deep, is a common misquote — he actually wrote, “And into the forest I go, to lose myself and find my soul.” But the version Sutherland cites feels more fitting for a horror film these days, particularly one where the main character experiences most of their terror not just in the forest, but because of the forest. It might as well read, “And into the forest I go, to eventually die.”
Which isn’t quite how things unfold for Lennon (Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell), but just as well! We first meet our heroine, a newly-minted park ranger with a haunted past (Indie Horror Mad Libs, anyone?), as she drives to work in the dark, listening to a radio broadcast about missing persons, specifically those who have gone missing in the woods. Along the way, Lennon comes to a stop at the sight of a black deer in the middle of the road. It stares into her soul; she stares back. But her attentive gaze is interrupted by a screeching sound on the A.M. dial. She switches it off, exhales, and when she looks up, the deer is gone.
It’s a familiar opening sequence — a character, alone in a dark setting, is harshly disturbed by a frightening creature/object that doubles as a foreboding omen. Yet just because something is familiar doesn’t make it cheap. What follows may feel repetitive and safe at times, but this set piece lays the groundwork for a competent film about how we respond when old wounds reopen.
Lovely, Dark, and Deep delivers beats you’ve seen before, but in distinctive ways. Deer, for instance, pop up in horror films all the time — they represent innocence and protection, often presenting themselves to others if you’ve been hurt and your heart needs tending, which makes the dead deer we see at the start of Jordan Peele’s Get Out all the more heartbreaking. But have you ever seen a deer with smoky, blackened fur? You’ve seen a deer in headlights before, but have you ever seen a character be more fearful of the deer than vice versa?
In short, what follows is The Cabin in the Woods if the cabin was the woods, an imbalanced yet absorbing descent into madness and terror through the eyes of a tortured vessel. As has become a staple in the genre, the seeds of this terror were planted long ago: When Lennon was a child, her sister went missing in the woods, a loss she feels responsible for. Naturally, it’s what led her to becoming a park ranger: she who was once responsible for one person in the wilderness must now be responsible for all of its visitors.
This sort of narrative decision does feel rather on the nose — no longer is it one’s fear that is the mind-killer in horror films, but one’s trauma — yet it doesn’t matter nearly as much as it otherwise might thanks to Campbell’s layered performance. The ascendant Scream Queen draws more out of her character than one imagines Lennon could have been in lesser hands. While Barbarian required Campbell to access terror on full-tilt, Lovely, Dark, and Deep sees her mining authentic hope out of a hopeless scenario. To instill even the slightest shred of optimism in an audience well aware that the backdrop to her terror is a vast, dangerous national park essentially defies the impossible.
Not as impossible, yet still an impressive feat, is the ability to render real scares in broad daylight. And though Sutherland’s film does so with sharp orchestral strums and screams from those suffering, both common cues in the genre, it’s commendable that it even tries. Midsommar this is not, particularly because Lovely, Dark, and Deep does still spend a great deal of its time in the dark. Ari Aster’s second film did what no film had done before, drawing discomfort and dread out of increasingly bright landscapes littered with inviting bursts of color that made up its central Swedish cult’s design palette.
But Lovely, Dark, and Deep still manages to create something fresh, tactfully keeping its reliance on recognizable, cult-adjacent themes that give a heftier weight to its chills to a reasonable minimum. What matters more to Sutherland is what we struggle to live with whether the lights are bright or have gone out completely, and how it impacts our mindset, for better or worse. In a horror film forest full of trauma-laden trees toppling silently, this is the rare sort that makes a sound.
