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Alex and Jenn are seen leaving the city in their SUV headed toward backcountry area. Jenn is seen throughout the beginning glued to her cellphone. They arrive at the visitor center and are greeted by the park ranger. On their first night, deep in the forest, they have an unsettling encounter with Brad, a strange alpha male with eyes for Jenn who may or may not be following them. Alex';;s desire to quickly reach Blackfoot Trail only intensifies. They push further and further into the woods, Alex stubbornly insisting that he remembers the way.
Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you, as the philosopher Sam Elliott said. Backcountry succeeds by not straying far from that core belief.
"Backcountry" inevitably brings on the bloody, but it finds atmospheric ways to depict how the bucolic hush of a nature getaway can morph into a survival nightmare for the unprepared.
Given that most killer bear movies are either intentionally cheesy or unwittingly inept, it's nice to see a new one that takes the concept seriously and forgoes easy splatter in favor of some strong, simple, sustained suspense.
Apparently inspired by a true story that the movie made me very much not want to look up, which I suppose may be taken by some to be a token of its effectiveness.
The film's main source of anxiety remains the lone, terrified figure, thoroughly unprepared for the savage beast who attacks, and faced at last by an uncaring natural world.
Backcountry thrives in the close-quarter details: the verbal knife-pricks of a dying relationship, the jangling impact of the smallest sounds breaking silence, that dread certainty that you're completely lost and it's getting dark.