A lone hiker (Tara Perry) is distracted by her phone and gets ambushed by a knife-wielding stranger in the woods – that’s it, that’s the chosen opening to Where Darkness Falls (2025), but it seems Trish, the hiker, survives her ordeal, racking up a slew of therapy appointments and meditation recordings in the year which follows. She fits these around her career as a journalist: she works for a magazine-type, listicle-loving website and really wants to break away from all this into what could be more broadly considered ‘news’. As such, she’s encouraged, and then immediately repulsed by a new commission, a kind of ‘creepy disappeared hiker’ piece and yes, they really offered this to her. I’ve said it many times, but I’m always amazed by the want of safeguarding in certain films, and this film has just found itself a place on that list. Maybe there’s a listicle coming.
Anyway, keen to prove she’s ‘over it’, Trish begins researching one of the missing women in particular: Stephanie (Kara Schaaf), last seen posting a video where she advised her followers to ‘get lost on purpose’, which was clearly sage advice. These final videos, by the by, are more exasperating than eerie – a kind of ‘are white women okay?’ vibe rather than The Blair Witch Project. Any crossover between inspiration-type content creation and blind terror is tougher to navigate than simply ‘found footage’ ever was. But it matters not, because it turns out that this is just one small cog in a very, very cog-rich machine.
In the spirit of journalism, Trish manages to find Stephanie’s last-known location on a map, so she decides to retrace her steps (!) by driving to the area and exploring. A number of awful nightmares don’t dissuade her from this plan, and nor does a chance discovery: a remote mental institution called Wentworth, which is situated very close to where Stephanie went missing. Trish heads straight there, walks straight in (clearly a very progressive institute, this) and despite being asked nicely to depart by some of the staff, sneaks back in to look around, finding a number of mysterious but tantalising clues which seem to support Trish’s hunch: that Stephanie is here as an unwitting patient.
But we’re not done adding different elements; oh, no. In fact, there’s a roster of things yet to fit into the ninety minutes allotted: please look away here, if you want to avoid spoilers. Okay, so we have: escaped madmen? Maniacal medical staff? Masked slasher-type characters? A woodland cult? And, my Jesus my, something which might be a sasquatch, or some other kind of big, hairy creature, with a folk horror chaser. This all follows, remember, the initial set-up of a traumatised woman and a number of missing women. Where Darkness Dwells, a lot of other things apparently dwell as well.
The film cannot be accused, then, of lacking ideas, even if it does lack a rationale for what to keep and what to throw out. Some rather convenient, plot-expedient inclusions make proceedings even shakier, honestly, and can occur in short order, which feels extra careless: the unlocked mental institution strewn with relevant paperwork; absurd lapses in security; the guy who throws Trish out seemingly happy to talk policy with her in the grounds, moments later. It makes the necessary suspensions of disbelief more tricky, especially when it does the unforgiveable – seemingly suggesting, in some places, that this could be ‘all a dream’: that’s a lot to ask of horror fans, even though we’re generally very forgiving people (and even if the film retreats from this suggestion).
There’s a nagging suspicion here that director and co-writer Michael May may be partly channelling Barbarian, a film which starts from a lowly Airbnb and very successfully accommodates a number of seemingly disparate elements, but it goes to show how tricky that kind of shift is to execute. And it’s a shame, actually, as Where Darkness Dwells has some great technical aspects: some fantastic camerawork, a decent soundtrack and some skilled edits. It’s just that all of this great technical work happens to be framing a rather confusing melee.