It’s the longest day of the year in the small hamlet of Pangnirtung, part of the Canadian Nunavut territory – close to the Arctic Circle. The adults of the village are excited for the special yearly barn dance, but there’s not a hell of a lot for the teens and pre-teens of Pang to do. Still, they spend a lot of time taking care of their own, and have a sense of camaraderie that, at a guess, will come in handy, especially given there’s some strange lights on the outskirts of town. We the audience have seen evidence of what this could be already, as something strange dispatches a Sacrificial White Guy doing surveying in the area.
Still, the kids make their own fun, stealing (‘borrowing’) a boat and heading out to what they refer to as ‘the land’, an area just off the coast, where they encounter what can only be described as a singularly messed-up polar bear. It lurches on its elbows in a really odd way, though to be fair, a polar bear in any sort of nick would be a terrifying prospect – but it sees them and chases them. The girls manage to escape, pondering whether this may be a shapeshifter as-described in Inuit folklore – but interest in this as an explanation is pretty short-lived. They now have a very, very tame party to sneak off to, after all. Would the proverbial have hit the fan even without the girls’ tinkering? Probably, yes, as the strange presence seems to have made its way closer to town under its own steam, but certainly, the kids are now of interest to whatever-it-is, and wouldn’t you know, they are primed to fight back?
Slash/Back (2022) feels like it’s crying out for an added blast of bombast: it’s all a little low-key, with acres of chit-chat from the girls which punctuates the action, not in a way which contributes a great deal to their characters or back-stories, but in a way which feels a little like necessary padding, because the budget didn’t extend to too many big scenes. Mobile phones are frequently referenced. There are odd lapses in reaction to peril. This is a bunch of first-time actors for the most part, too, which sees them a little understated on screen, though the performances are certainly not terrible: I always feel that if you can get to the end of a film which has child protagonists without hating them, it’s something of a win. Clearly director Nyla Innuksuk is writing two simultaneous love-letters here – one to The Thing (1982) (with an open reference to it in the script) and one to, well, pick any kiddie hero horror from the mid-eighties to Attack The Block (2011). This gives them the tough job of not only balancing aims against available funds, but also blood-curdling body horror against a far more kid-friendly tone, including the levels of violence; even the blood splatter here is black, not red, which is one of those odd loopholes which can impact on age ratings. The film is trying to be too many things, perhaps, so it feels as if it’s all been spread rather thinly.
That said, it’s hard to imagine how you could film the hostile beauty of this part of the world and make it look anything other than stunning; the hamlet itself is an effective setting, too, because it’s not exactly a fortified, well-equipped urban fortress or anything of the kind. It’s a vulnerable and isolated spot where people have long lived on their wits, passing down survival skills from one generation to another. Maika’s too-frequent disavowals of ‘boring Inuit stuff’ make it almost certain that she’ll have to rely on what her father taught her; hopefully that isn’t a spoiler, because, yep. And, when the film can focus on the alien invaders themselves, some of the sequences are genuinely rather good: the practical SFX work is better than the CGI, as some of the contorted, slack-faced creatures are genuinely very unpleasant. We learn but little of the aliens’ motivations, on balance, but this is true of a lot of films, and perhaps their single-minded advance is enough in a lot of respects. There are some good ideas here and some fun sequences, even if the film is held back by a few factors. It’s a decent, if not outstanding offering.
Slash/Back is available now via VOD services.