Lovely, Dark, and Deep
Written and Directed by Teresa Sutherland
Starring Georgina Campbell, Nick Blood, & Wai Ching Ho
MPAA Rating:
Runtime: 87 minutes
Available to watch on demand February 22

by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer

Lovely, Dark, and Deep is a film that makes a lot of sense on paper: It’s a small-scale horror/thriller set in the deep wilderness, allowing a savvy production to get a lot of value out of its locations. It stars Georgina Campbell, fresh off her breakout role in Barbarian, as an isolated woman who is the only character onscreen for significant portions of the film. Finally, though it’s Teresa Sutherland’s feature directorial debut, she was a staff writer on Netflix’s Midnight Mass and was behind the script for 2018’s underrated prairie horror The Wind (dir. Emma Tammi). All of these things seem like they should add up to a successful film, but Lovely, Dark, and Deep is undermined by its own premise from the start.

Before you continue, a word of warning: in order to talk about my issues with this film I will be spoiling the plot.

The first act of LDD proceeds in a straightforward fashion, introducing Cambell’s Ranger Lennon as a new addition to the backcountry staff at (fictional) Arvores National Park. Not long after, as Lennon makes her first few forays into the park’s rocky landscape, we’re introduced to the world that LDD inhabits through a montage of true crime podcasts that soundtrack her solo hikes (a pretty clever form of exposition I have to say). The montage only lasts about 3 minutes, though, and it’s the only setup for much of what’s to come, so you’d better be paying attention! The podcasts describe a veritable epidemic of people disappearing in the U.S. National Parks, one that seems to be ignored by the National Park Service and its forest rangers. Arvores is apparently the worst of the bunch, the only reason given being its large “granite boulder fields” according to one podcast.

Lennon’s sister, it transpires, is one such missing person, having disappeared in Arvores when they were both children. In becoming a backcountry ranger Lennon has unfettered access to the place where her sister disappeared and is intent on unraveling the park’s mystery. As becomes evident (likely of no surprise to genre fans), it is some aspect of the wilderness itself that is responsible for these disappearances. The rangers must not intervene when someone is selected to be taken and, when Lennon unknowingly rescues Arvores’ latest victim, we learn that such a transgression must be paid for with another life. At the film’s climax, we learn from Lennon’s supervisor Ranger Zhang (Wai Ching Ho) that the unknown force that stalks the landscape sees the rangers as benevolent enough that they are spared as long as they don’t disrupt the status quo. Zhang, though, regrets her complicity in the disappearance of Lennon’s sister and offers her life in exchange for the backpacker Lennon stole. “You’re going to make one hell of a ranger,” Zhang says as dark hands pull her into the shadows.

…At which point I yelled “WHAT?” at the screen, the only reasonable reaction to LDD trying to end on that note. Just to go over what’s underlying this film’s story, the rangers in the National Park Service are running what is essentially a supernatural human trafficking scheme. Lennon’s sister was one of its victims, an event that completely destroyed her family and left her with deep psychological scars. On top of that, everything that Lennon has experienced in the film clearly indicates that getting taken by the land is not a peaceful or happy experience. The backpacker that Lennon rescues is traumatized, her hands and thighs covered in blood. By the film’s end, Lennon has experienced firsthand the terrors that her sister went through. She has refused to take the life of a stranger to save her own. Are we really meant to believe that she’ll just turn around and become complicit in the taking of others? But the film’s closing sequence makes that complicity explicit, with Lennon abandoning a hiker that has been “taken” by the wilderness.

Even setting aside the QAnon-adjacent reading of a film about government agents involved in human trafficking (and NPS is a frequent target of far-right vitriol), the world that Sutherland has crafted with her narrative only grows less coherent as it is examined. The film seems to indicate that this phenomenon only occurs in National Parks, but those have only been around for a century or so. Did people start disappearing when Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act in 1916 (not the worst he’d have done by a long shot), or were people being taken before then? Does it happen in other wildernesses or just the National Parks? Does it happen in Canada? The questions only breed more questions and, what’s more, trying to fix any historical starting point for the disappearances means grappling with the history of the U.S. as a settler colonial state, something that Sutherland chooses (wisely, perhaps) to avoid. One of the reasons I thought the supernatural elements of The Wind, Sutherland’s previous script (which operates along a very similar axis to LDD), worked was that it was defined just enough to feel threatening but not so much that the audience felt compelled to resolve it into something solid.

Campbell’s performance also isn’t quite able to sustain the full weight of the film, though it doesn’t exactly feel like her fault. She’s clearly a talented actress and I thought she was fantastic in Barbarian, a narrative that isn’t exactly a light lift for any of its cast. Here, though, Campbell is literally the sole presence on screen for most of the film. There is rarely someone or something for her to act against and, even when there is, the narrative demands placed on the character also restrict the sort of interactions she can have as an actress. It seems incredibly challenging for any actor, and as a result the film struggles through a good chunk of the second and third acts. Nowhere is this problem more evident than when Lennon begins to lose her grip on reality and the narrative fractures around her. It’s a common enough device, especially in horror, but LDD throws out any sense of continuity and the audience is left to fend for itself. The sequence feels very poorly scripted at best and cobbled together from random footage at worst, and the film never really recovers.

It’s too bad, because I would’ve really liked to see a small-scale horror production like this one succeed. The landscape footage is impeccable, and both the drone and ground camerawork look amazing. Sutherland and her production team found some downright gorgeous locations and they wring a lot of value out of them; however small a production it was, the vastness of the landscape means LDD feels like it’s on a much larger scale. The National Parks of Portugal are also surprisingly effective as a stand-in for Californian wilderness (I say as someone who has spent zero time in the wilderness of California). The individual pieces, the trees and bushes and rocks, look more or less correct, but there’s something about the way that they’re put together that doesn’t feel quite right. At first glance the landscape seems innocuous, but in trying to replicate the American west it’s subtly unsettling in a way that lends itself well to the film’s vibe. In the end, though, these positives aren’t enough to outweigh the film’s glaring issues, and Lonely, Dark, and Deep is not a film I’d be excited to revisit.