‘Brightwood’ is a new horror movie by director Dane Elcar which was released on 21^st March across streaming platforms in the UK.  This follows a successful US release.

The film is essentially a two-hander.  The thirty-something leads, Dana Berger (as Jen) and Max Woertendyke (as Dan, also the movie’s producer) are the only actors who appear.  Jen and Dan’s relationship is on the skids and the spat which opens the movie, concerning Dan’s flirting with Jen’s female colleagues during a party held to celebrate her promotion is clearly only their latest dispute.  The couple aren’t drawn particularly sympathetically.  Dan’s rationalizations for his behavior aren’t very convincing while Jen’s criticisms are less perceptive than spiteful.  In terms of performance, the actors are solid, particularly Woertendyke as the rather stolid and unassuming Dan.  Berger can sometimes be somewhat over-emphatic, but she has the harder task.  Jen is often on the verge of hysterics and it is difficult for an actor to blub and not seem childish and retain audience sympathy.  Offhand I can only think of Veronica Cartwright in Alien (1979) pulling this off and she didn’t have to carry that film the way that Berger does here.  The dialogue is occasionally clunky but generally serviceable.

Two hander films generally succeed or fail by the quality of their acting and writing.  That doesn’t really apply here because nature, or at least as it is represented by the lake and the surrounding foliage, manifests as a third character and this is where the film’s real strength lies.  The cutaways to trees and bushes and tracking shots along the rippling lake suggest a kind of sentience in the surroundings and create a peculiar claustrophobia of open spaces.  This atmosphere is reinforced by the movie’s superb sound design.  This blends the score and disconcerting background noise into an omnipresent soundscape which underscores the characters’ dilemmas at every point.

It may be, as some critics have postulated, that ‘Brightwood’ is Elcar’s commentary on a failing relationship, with Jen and Dan running around in literal circles.  This reading makes the ending particularly cruel and ironic. 

An interesting hypothesis but ‘Brightwood’’s real success is in creating a situation so terrifying that identification with the characters is inevitable and the film rises above any shortcomings in dialogue and characterization.

It is always tempting to treat a movie debut as a showreel but on this evidence, Dane Elcar is a definite talent who with better budgets and more polished scripts may yield great results in the future.