- Directed by Rodrigo Gudino
- Written by Nick Cutter, Ian Weir
- Stars Allan Hawco, Emily Alatalo, Natalie Brown, Wesley French
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 32 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqzbKSK3qS8
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
A bizarrely dead body throws a wrench into the plans of a sheriff who is expecting a quiet finish to his final days before leaving town. The case takes him and a couple of companions on a path to a Lovecraftian disaster. It starts out strong and weakens as it goes along; the Horror Guys are in agreement there but split in opinion, with Kevin going on the side of kind of liked and Brian going with kind of hated.
Synopsis
We hear ominous music as a canoe drifts downriver, apparently empty. It drifts over to a family picnic, where they find something inside, and screams ensue. It wasn’t empty. Credits roll.
The police, Deputy Parks and Chief John Hawkins arrive, and the body is in a condition the cops have never seen before. The coroner the Chief wants is on vacation, so they bring in backup Jacob, who knows things. “Where’d the bones go?” John asks. Whatever did this, it wasn’t bugs or animals, and the corpse has too many fingers. They identified the body as Cole Parsons, a physicist from Oklahoma.
He goes to talk to Meg Fullbright, who took Cole Parsons to a cabin in the middle of nowhere. She says he brought up a lot of big equipment, but she doesn’t know what the man was doing. Cole Parsons’ daughter went missing a while back, and she’s never been found. Linda Parsons, Cole’s wife, blamed the disappearance on something that Cole built.
John and Meg, along with Jacob, head to the cabin, which is way out in the woods. They hear a strange sound that seems to be coming from… everywhere. When they arrive, Meg says the place looks different, like it’s gotten older. It’s huge but also like an abandoned shack. They find a strange machine in the basement hooked into the wiring. In a room upstairs, they find all kinds of weird stuff. Jake keeps getting bitten by bugs, which he finds annoying.
Back in the police station, Deputy Connie Parks Zoom-talks to Alex, a doctor who explains particle physics and the Mandela effect. At the weird house, we hear that Jake, John, and Meg are a former love triangle that’s gotten all dramatic over the years, and now John is planning to leave town. That night, we see a ladder descend from the attic, and something enters Jake’s room.
Meg and John find a woman in the hallway with a shotgun; she’s Linda Parsons, the unstable wife of Cole and the mother of the missing girl. They find Jake in the attic room with all the equipment, but he doesn’t remember how he got there or who turned on the machine.
Linda and Meg look over the machine, which has a big “portal”-looking doorway in it. “This machine took her,” Linda says. John shows Linda to Cole’s “crazy room,” and she says it doesn’t look like Cole’s work.
All of a sudden, Cole appears outside, very much not dead. When John explains about the body in the canoe, Cole says, “Jeepers, that’s terrible.” He’s very strange and doesn’t act normal.
As they talk, Jake pulls Band-Aids off the many bug bites he’s gotten overnight; he also notices that the pupil in one eye has split in two.
Alex tells Connie that the people at CERN are doing black magic rituals to open a doorway to Hell. Surprisingly, she doesn’t take him seriously. At some point, Meg tells John that she’s pregnant with his baby, further upping the drama.
Jake’s hand gets all deformed, and Linda says he must have been inside the machine when it turned on. Cole wouldn’t have put his own daughter in that thing– would he? Cole tells Meg, “You are the breach,” so John punches him.
John and Meg go downriver to find a boat or get a phone signal, leaving Linda and Cole alone with Jake. Connie calls John’s voicemail and says the body in the canoe was definitely Cole.
Linda gets into Cole’s computer and sees video records of Cole “feeding” multiple people into the machine. We see on the videos that he’s also becoming deformed. She also sees what happened to Isabelle, her daughter.
Outside, Meg encounters a man with no skin, while inside, Jake’s skin falls off as John watches. Skinless people start coming out of the woods in droves. Isabelle finally shows up, and she wants Linda to go back into the machine with her, which she does.
John goes upstairs and pours gasoline on the machine while Meg plays “Resident Evil” with the zombies in the front yard. Cole attacks John and bites off a few fingers. The fire makes the building explode, with Cole and John inside it.
We get a final scene with Deputy Connie delivering a package of John’s stuff to Meg, who’s now very pregnant. The specialists around the cabin might be calling for a major evacuation of the area soon. We see that Meg’s been burning bodies in the backyard.
Commentary
The cinematographer and editor went all out trying to make this fairly talky film more interesting to watch– it was not subtle. The dialog, on the other hand, is slow, stretched out, and all seems very unnatural. The music in some scenes feels really inappropriate and a little too overpowering. The sets do look nice, however, and the acting, apart from the dialog, is pretty good.
It’s slow, drawn-out, and not particularly original in any way. It does, however, look good and creates a feeling of dread. It started out nicely atmospheric, but the ending was just atrocious, says Horror Guy Brian. Horror Guy Kevin liked it quite a bit more than that.