Lovely, Dark, And Deep: Nature Abhors A Vacuum

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep, 

And miles to go before I sleep.

 

- Robert Frost

One of the most common taxonomies of narrative conflict divides it into three: Man against man, man against nature, and man against self. And in my experience writing this thing, man against nature definitely earns its keep. The wilderness is scary – beautiful and utterly impassive, indifferent to the fates of the creatures that inhabit it, including humans. The Blair Witch Project knows it, In The Earth knows it, Yellowbrickroad knows it, even lesser films like Gaia and The Ritual know it. The wilderness is full of things that may very well mean you harm, and it’s easy to lose yourself.

Lovely, Dark, And Deep knows it too. It’s an eerie, deliberately (possibly too deliberately) paced story about the burdens we carry and the mysteries of nature.

We’re introduced to a sprawling expanse of forest known simply as “the backcountry,” and the rangers who patrol it from tiny cabins, on their own for months. It’s the start of the day and everyone’s sounding off by radio to indicate that they’re okay. It passes around to Ranger Varney, and we see him outside his cabin, shouldering a pack, closing up the cabin and ignoring his radio. He’s repeatedly asked to sound off, but he goes about his business. The requests turn to pleas, and Varney tapes a piece of paper over the “The Ranger Is In” sign outside the cabin.

It says “I owe this land a body.”

Sometime later, the backcountry rangers are gathering for the start of a new season. Lennon is a ranger new to the detail, someone who’s worked her way up the ladder to this assignment. It’s what she’s always wanted to do, but the other rangers seem awkward around her. She’s prickly and distant, but she knows how she’s seen by the others. There’s a backstory there and rumors get around. It’s a tough gig working in the backcountry - you’re out in the middle of nowhere, reachable only by helicopter, for months in monastic living conditions. A lot of weird shit happens out there, and people go missing all the time, with only a fraction ever found. As it turns out, one of those people was Lennon’s sister Jenny. It was a long time ago, and Lennon has become a ranger specifically to take this assignment, to patrol the woods where her sister vanished, and do her best to pick up a trail that went cold decades ago. She’s a woman on a mission and she’s used to being seen as crazy or obsessed. And maybe she is, given the distance she’s gone to try and solve her sister’s disappearance. But she’s a competent ranger, if not always good at following orders.

What follows is Lennon moving deeper and deeper into the wilderness, dealing with another missing hiker case (people go missing in the wilderness, but an unusual number go missing out here), clashing with her superiors and realizing that there’s something else out there. It’s not an especially histrionic film, performances and dialogue are believable and low-key, the somber reserve of people who have a difficult job to do. Everyone seems believable and even Lennon, in her rash decisions and tendency to disobey orders, comes across as someone deeply driven by guilt and grief, possibly to the point of obsession. But no scenery gets chewed, there aren’t really any jump scares. It’s very quiet and meditative with brief but effective moments that communicate the sinister strangeness underneath the beauty. This film lets things happen in the background (which I’ve always found more unnerving than showing something in my face and yelling BOO!), and it has an excellent sense of wrongness without going overboard. It’s not overexplained, and it doesn’t need to be because the visuals do a lot of the work, cryptic but evocative.

That said, I do think that the deliberate pace is, in this case, a bit of a double-edged sword. I like it when a film has the confidence to slow down and build a mood, and the pace and relative quiet communicate what it’d be like to spend months by yourself in the actual middle of nowhere. But the deliberate pace also means that the film drags at points, spinning its wheels a little. More escalation wouldn’t have been out of place, but the overall effect is that of gradually sinking into a dream, where reality, grief, and something outside of our understanding gradually come together and it works pretty well on that front.

The end does let it down a little as well. It builds to a climax, but that climax could have used more tension instead of continuing the very even, gradual pace of the previous acts, and the ultimate reveal is maybe a little on-the-nose and over-exposited. The film is very good about showing instead of telling everywhere else, so I think they could have carried that a little more into the end, but otherwise it carries some of the same narrative and tonal DNA as Absentia and Censor, however different the settings, resulting in a nicely creepy meditation on grief, guilt, and letting go.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon