Indie horror Brightwood, from director Dane Elcar, stars Dana Berger and Max Woertendyke as Jen and Dan, a married couple who have hit a rocky patch in their relationship. Having disgraced himself while drunk at a social gathering, Dan tries to patch things up with Jen as she jogs around a local pond, but things take a very unexpected turn when the pair discover that they are unable to find the trail that leads home and realise that they have become caught in a temporal glitch that sees them encountering multiple versions of themselves.
Although beautifully shot, with decent performances from its cast of two, Brightwood cannot escape the fact that it's a full length film stretched out from Elcar's earlier 2018 short The Pond, which appears to have been fairly derivative in the first place, the inescapable location smacking of Blair Witch and the time loop reminiscent of Triangle. Berger and Woertendyke do the best they can with their parts, combining tension with humour, and I like the way that the film draws parallels between being trapped in a failing marriage and being trapped in a nightmarish perpetual time loop, but after a while I felt like I was caught in an infinite loop myself, as the film - much like it's characters - covers the same ground over and over again.
For me, the final scene is the best part of the film, revealing how Jen and Dan have become closer as a result of their ordeal and have found a way to survive at all costs.
Although beautifully shot, with decent performances from its cast of two, Brightwood cannot escape the fact that it's a full length film stretched out from Elcar's earlier 2018 short The Pond, which appears to have been fairly derivative in the first place, the inescapable location smacking of Blair Witch and the time loop reminiscent of Triangle. Berger and Woertendyke do the best they can with their parts, combining tension with humour, and I like the way that the film draws parallels between being trapped in a failing marriage and being trapped in a nightmarish perpetual time loop, but after a while I felt like I was caught in an infinite loop myself, as the film - much like it's characters - covers the same ground over and over again.
For me, the final scene is the best part of the film, revealing how Jen and Dan have become closer as a result of their ordeal and have found a way to survive at all costs.