Slash/Back

I will say up front that, more than anything, Slash/Back feels like a labor of love. It wants to capture authentic Inuit culture, and the director is a huge fan of John Carpenter’s The Thing and wanted to pay homage to it. I respect that they filmed on location in Pangnirtung, a tiny, isolated village in Nunavut, and got local actors to fill the roles rather than casting professional actors with no ties to the land, culture, or people. And I love that it wants to capture the beauty of Nunavut, a place most people reading this or watching this movie will never visit (and many will have to consult a map to even find it). I just wish it was in service of a better movie. Essentially an all-girl Monster Squad versus The Thing, Slash/Back suffers from problems that the director’s inexperience and need for authenticity creates. Again, I stress I’m glad they went with Inuit actors to portray Inuit people. But that doesn’t mean they’re good at acting. The four leads — all teenage girls around 13 or 14 — are either wooden, or were directed to give the most stilted, bland performances. Reactions never seem authentic for the situation. Dialogue is said as if everybody is reading it for the first time. And it doesn’t help that the script does little to differentiate the girls at all. I can’t remember any of their names and I just watched it an hour ago, and aside from their age, gender, and ethnicity, I can’t tell you what makes one different from the other. The problems with direction extend to the storytelling, as the movie has no sense of rhythm. The plot develops whenever it feels like it, and then takes time off and leaves us with four identical characters being best frenemies for lengthy stretches. It would be fine if the plot kicked in a lot sooner than halfway through, or if the girls had ANY differentiation. But it doesn’t and they don’t. For all this movie’s love of The Thing, it doesn’t understand that one thing it excelled at it was getting things started and keeping things rolling with new twists and developments. Slash/Back arrives, takes half its time to state its intentions, and then reduces the fight to “girls with hunting experience chase down slow moving zombie creatures”. I know you read the book, movie, so why didn’t you do the homework? And it’s doubly frustrating because, apart from the plot, the director does a good job with everything else. The music, the special effects (which are on the edge of good and bad in the best way, making things feel unearthly and wrong), the lighting, the cinematography … especially that last one. It made me want to travel there, seeing that landscape. Hearing the language, seeing the town, it’s all visually hypnotizing. And again, you can feel the passion in all of it. Nothing is played for camp. But subpar acting, threadbare characters, and a story constantly fighting its own momentum, suck the life out of the movie.