CONSUMED (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Consumed, Brainstorm Media

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 15, 2024

A husband and wife—or anyone, for that matter—alone on a camping trip in the remote woods does not bode well in the movies, and that's certainly the case in Consumed. There's someone and/or something in the forest, and even though screenwriter David Calbert sets up some intriguing ideas about its trio of human characters and the one supernatural one, the whole affair becomes a predictable routine of chasing, hiding, and explaining.

The wife is Beth (Courtney Halverson), whose husband Jay (Mark Famigelietti) seems a little too eager to help her while they're camping, packing, and hiking on and off the trail. She insists she can do these things herself, but it doesn't stop him from lightening the load in the backpack and offering a hand while they're climbing a rocky hill.

We soon enough learn that Beth had cancer and has been in remission for about a year. This trip is to celebrate that fact, but upon arriving in the woods, she's haunted by nightmares of her body, altered from life-saving surgery, being poked, prodded, and ripped apart by large, clawed hands. As a horrific metaphor, it's unsettling and understandable imagery, but Calbert and director Mitchell Altieri also soon enough show that their minds are set on more literal forms of horror.

It all starts quickly—perhaps too quickly to really get a feel for Beth and Jay as characters and the dynamic of their relationship. Beth secretly cleans a wound in a stream when she falls, after refusing Jay's aid, and she notices that there's more blood in the water than should be coming from the scrape down her leg. Upstream, she spots a bloody carcass.

It's a bear, or at least, that's what Jay thinks it must be. The animal's skin has been completely removed. Some might take that as a sign to abandon the trip or get away from the area as soon as possible, because anyone or anything that could and would do that to a bear isn't anyone or anything you want to meet alone in the woods.

The two keep going, though. Beth also discovers the ruins of an old, stone edifice, where the walls and other monuments are draped with whole bodies' worth of human skin. That gets her to think it's time to leave, but the couple soon hears strange growling nearby. They run and keep running, until Jay accidentally steps in a bear trap, snapping his leg above his ankle basically in half.

The trap belongs to Quinn (Devon Sawa), a hunter dressed in animal fur and living alone in a self-made bunker somewhere in the forest. He saves Beth and Jay from the creature chasing them—a puff of smoke and fire that speeds through the air and darts around trees. After getting them to safety, Quinn explains to the couple that the monster is a wendigo. It's a supernatural entity capable of possessing its victims, according to Jay, whose knowledge is likely because he spends the remainder of the story unconscious in the bunker and has to have one last useful thing to do.

In case it isn't obvious by now, the movie is in a hurry to set up only the bare minimum for a series of suspense sequences. The only real questions here are why Quinn is in the forest and what his intentions are with the wendigo and, by extension, the married couple. It's not much of a surprise once Beth spots a pendant with a girl's picture around the hunter's neck, and sure enough, Quinn wants to kill the beast. Beth offers to help, because it's the only way she and Quinn can get Jay out of the woods for medical care.

The rest of the plot is a by-the-numbers affair, as Quinn and Beth track and wait for the monster, talk a bit about the traumas they have faced (and, in Beth's case, are about to face again), and try to kill the beast. There are a couple of slightly unexpected developments here, such as Beth discovering just how far Quinn is willing to go to get the wendigo and why it might not be so easy for him to kill it—beyond the fact that it's a supernatural being that mainly exists as smoke.

The general momentum of the plot is admirable, if only because it keeps us from asking too many questions about the mythology, how Quinn has been able to do what he does to lure the monster for years without anyone noticing, and why Beth would trust this stranger to the extent she ultimately does, considering the two significant things she knows about him. The staging of the suspense sequences, as well as the visual and practical effects (A late bit of stop-motion animation makes us wonder how many old-fashioned techniques might have been used earlier) within them, is competent. Halverson and Sawa are solid, too, as suffering characters who find some camaraderie in shared pain.

That idea, though, is between the lines of Consumed. The movie only has eyes and time for the straight line of its monster tale, which doesn't have much to say, do, or consider beyond the obvious.

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