Written and Directed by Bretten Hannam | 81 min | ▲▲▲▲

This is an updated version of a review that appeared during coverage of the 2025 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival

This chilling supernatural horror is Bretten Hannam’s third feature, and while I was a fan of his most recent picture, Wildhood, this feels like a quantum leap in terms of maturity and emotional context. It’s about two indigenous brothers (Forrest Goodluck and Blake Alec Miranda), close as kids but estranged as adults, haunted by a shared trauma in their past and unable to shake it. The trauma appears as an angry spirit, and inspires the elder to find his younger brother and take a journey into the woods — a very Hearts Of Darkness trip up the river, with maybe a touch of Deliverance, too.

As they journey together, they’re visited by the ghosts of their past and futures — themselves as children, but also their ancestors, and their descendants. Hannam explained at the TIFF Q&A that time can be seasonal, and the film uses that cyclical perspective to tell a story informed by modern horror — certainly inspired by the work of Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, but with a vision specific to Hannam and their collaborators. There’s imagery in this I’ve never seen in a feature film before — the way they shoot insects in slow motion, a body reduced to black webbing, or a glowing gateway in the woods: It all works as an allegory of trauma and healing from an indigenous frame of reference.

Also making his presence felt here is Canadian acting legend Glen Gould, who has frequently come to work in Nova Scotia on shows like Sullivan’s Crossing and Diggstown. He starred in Hannam’s first film, North Mountain — which almost cost the filmmaker their toes to the cold — but I’ll always think of Gould as the lead in Michael Melski’s Halifax-set crime thriller, Charlie Zone.