“The Corridor”, directed by Evan Kelly and written by Josh
MacDonald, is a Canadian road horror thriller with perhaps an interesting, even
disturbing premise. Unfortunately, the
five young men on this “bonding” weekend in the Nova Scotia woods don’t measure
up to the challenge enough to make you care.
And maybe their descent into animal wilding when challenged by the
supernatural is the point.
As the film opens, Tyler Crawley has gone wild; his mother
has been killed (but maybe not by him), and two of his friends are
injured. We don’t know what
happened. But a few months later he gets
out of a mental hospital, well controlled on meds.
Four of his friends invite him on a road trip into the
woods, to a cabin. Indeed the “cabin in
the woods movie” has become another genre, perhaps. They’re careful and a bit cautious in how
they talk to him at first. The first
evening, Tyler goes out into the woods, to spread his mother’s ashes, and
encounters s supernatural entity that seems like a box of plasma, that can
extend into a corridor. He can step in
and out of it, but he gets a nosebleed.
He then sees his mother’s ghost.
When he tells the other guys, they go out the next morning,
and sure enough the entity is back, and bigger. It may have something to do with the
blinking cell phone tower nearby.
After the other men have been exposed by walking inside the
thing, they start going crazy and violent.
Tyler, on his meds, remains stable.
So it’s pretty obvious how he might have gone crazy. The guys do horrible things. One man scalps another, to put the rug on the
bald man. Guns start getting
involved. In time, only Tyler and one
other guy is left.
As the film draws near and end, we see more pyrotechnics
with the entity that gives some idea as to what the entity is. It can narrow to a thread, providing a
near-death portal, and then extinguish whoever is inside to ashes. Maybe this is what an alien life form could
do.
The implication is that an alien force, with these monsters
composed of electromagnetic fields, could destroy humanity and turn it back to
savagery. But some viewers felt that the other friends simply lacked purpose and real character and were vulnerable; not everyone would be/
The concept of the film draws on a number of cinema
traditions: Stephen King, not just
“Dreamcatcher” but also the CBS series “Under the Dome” (TV, July 11, 2013) the
Austrian film “The Wall” (Aug. 27, 2013), as well as psychological road movies,
ranging from horror (“Bugcrush” and “The House of Adam”) to subtle personal
mystery (“Old Joy”), or even “Ice Men”.
Official Facebook is here. The distributor is IFC.
I watched the film on Netflix Instant Video. The sound quality was unusually fuzzy.
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