Drive Back
Given that this is one of those films in which folks on a lonesome road keep driving up to the same spot – where a disturbingly familiar old bumper blocks the path – while trying to escape a possibly haunted patch of woods, it’s perhaps appropriate that the movie itself is so easy to get mixed up with several other recent pictures – Brightwood, Bring Out the Fear – which cover much the same ground but on foot. A few other elements hark back to oddities like Reeker, Los Cronocrimenes or Dead End, though it’s not quite as clearcut about whether the protagonists are in an afterlife limbo, a timeloop or a set of constructed circumstances calculated to give audiences nightmares.
Directed by Cody Ashford and writtern by Jon Sarro, Drive Back may be familiar enough to give longtime horror viewers déjà vu – but it still works, thanks to the specifics of this couple in this situation. A prologue establishes that a schlubby kid who likes drawing isn’t that keen on his father’s woodcraft skills when it comes to killing and dressing deer, then we leap to his adulthood as not-doing-too-well cartoonist Reid (Zack Gold) and his pregnant girlfriend Olivia (Whit Kunschik) are having an engagement party in the woods – and Dad (Robert Lewis Stephenson) burdens the couple’s car with supplies and survival gear because he still doesn’t trust his adult son on a three and a half hour drive back to civilisation. Already, questions are raised which suggest things are off-kilter … the marriage proposal has an air of desperate attempt to keep the relationship going, a horde of guests embarrass Reid by asking how his cartoons are going, and then the couple drive back alone though there were a whole bunch of their friends at the party who ought logically be leaving on the same route.
In typical 2020s film shorthand, phone service disappears so online maps are useless and a near-miss with a red asshole car spins them around so they don’t even know which way they were driving … then an unreassuring old lady (Madonna Young Magee) in an out of the way filling station cackles as she dispenses omens, lets Reid copy an ancient map on the wall (he prefers a diagram to instructions) and recommends a short cut … which lands the squabbling couple deeper in the woods, with possible psycho-killers glimpses between the trees and sudden, jarring breaks from day to night, an enigmatic and unhelpful hitchhiker (Jim Tuck) passed on the road, glimpses of fireside cannibalism, and nips back and forth in time and space which suggest a closed loop of very bad news. As in Brightwood and Bring Out the Fear, all this puts a lot of pressure on an already strained relationship – and the later stages slot into quite familiar grooves, though the punchline is relatively new and affecting.
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