“Lovely, Dark, and Deep” is the cinematic equivalent of being handed a compass that only points to “vibes.” Teresa Sutherland’s feature debut wants to be an existential forest nightmare about grief and missing people; it lands closer to a park-service training video directed by a malfunctioning screensaver. It’s moody, it’s misty, it’s gorgeously photographed bark… and it’s also 100 minutes of watching a very competent actor lose a staring contest with an aggressively metaphoric tree line.
Georgina Campbell, who could act anxiety into a houseplant, plays Lennon, a new backcountry ranger whose job is “don’t go missing like everyone else,” which she promptly fails with the determination of a straight-A student speedrunning detention. She’s haunted by the childhood disappearance of her sister, keeps a tasteful gallery wall of other missing persons in her cabin like Pinterest for tragedies, and carries a radio that receives distress calls even when the batteries are having a personal day. The plot insists this is ominous; it mostly feels like the park is on a family plan with Verizon.
The movie’s thesis is that the forest is not merely a setting but an entity—mysterious, predatory, and very into theater. We get distorted voices, déjà vu pathways, and time slips that function like the world’s pettiest GPS: “In 400 feet, make an impossible turn into trauma.” All of this could be terrifying, but the film mistakes withholding for horror. The dread never mounts; it moseys. Scenes end as if the editor sneezed. We cut from static shots of trees to static shots of Lennon thinking about trees, and the score lays down one long depressive hum, as if a refrigerator were having memories.
Sutherland is after a big mood—capital-M Mythic, capital-E Entities—and sure, the forest can be a great villain. See also: The Blair Witch Project, Annihilation, anything where a fern has an agenda. But great void horror knows when to give you a tooth. This movie gives you a mouthful of gums and begs you to imagine biting. When the rules finally get explained (sort of), they come courtesy of Zhang (Wai Ching Ho), the head ranger who essentially pitches Lennon on a predator–park services nonaggression pact. It’s a bold swing: the woods take who they want; the rangers keep the brochure pretty. The problem is that it’s presented with the energy of a midyear compliance seminar. “We regret the many souls eaten by the trees; please initial page four.”
Campbell deserves a raise for shouldering so much nothing. Her Lennon is a knot of guilt and grit, and Campbell plays the note beautifully—over and over—like a virtuoso violinist hired to perform a dial tone. Nick Blood’s Jackson appears periodically to rescue Lennon from geographic embarrassment and deliver exposition in the soothing baritone of a podcast about knives. Wai Ching Ho brings gravitas to Zhang, which the film repays by turning her into a human lore drop and then yeeting her into the metaphysical Lake of Symbolism. Every time a character starts to become interesting, the forest waves its hand and says, “Anyway, trauma.”
The movie’s relationship with time and space is less “uncanny” and more “unhelpful.” Lennon hikes north, then is somehow beside a lake on the other side of the park, which would be startling if the film hadn’t already pulled the same trick three times. Doors become portals, radios work as Ouija boards, and tents are Schrödinger’s zippers: sometimes you can open them, sometimes you are a ghost at a camping store. There’s a potentially delicious beat where Lennon encounters campers who can’t see her; the film uses it to tell her to commit murder to “replace what she took.” That’s ripe for moral horror, but the scene has the urgency of an overly polite ghost asking if you might consider doing a light homicide if it’s not too much trouble.
The imagery aims for uncanny. It often lands on décor. Lennon’s cabin morphs into her childhood home, the missing populate liminal hallways, and the lake functions as a baptismal font for plot points. It’s all handsomely captured, like a catalog for Sad National Parks. But handsome is not scary. Handsome is an Instagram carousel captioned “when the void is cute.” Even the brief, spiky shocks—faces where they shouldn’t be, signals from a dead radio—feel isolated, like someone sprinkling paprika on a bowl of air.
As for the Entities (capitalized, because the film certainly does), they’re conceptually strong and cinematically shy. They want “a replacement” for anyone Lennon rescues. Cool. Creepy. That’s a simple, cruel rule you can build a third act around. Instead, we get philosophical fencing and administrative guilt. The big climax is a trade—Zhang stays, Lennon goes—and the takeaway is that the forest respects paperwork. I’m not saying horror needs a knife in the ribs, but it could use something sharper than HR.
Thematically, the movie wants to braid missing-person dread with survivor’s guilt and institutional complicity. That’s a sturdy weave. But the strands fray because the script refuses to let characters do much beyond stand in allegory. Lennon’s final turn—refusing to help a disoriented hiker because she recognizes he’s “taken”—is pitched as bone-cold pragmatism. It plays as passive-aggressive cosmic ghosting. The choice could devastate if we weren’t already so numb. Instead it scans as, “Due to unforeseen supernatural circumstances, customer service is permanently closed.”
There are bright spots. Sound design occasionally conjures real unease: whispery bursts of radio chatter, the forest’s deep breath, the sudden, rude silence of a place that has decided you are ornamental. A few compositions linger: a bulletin board of the missing that feels like a chapel; a horizon that refuses to be where a horizon should be. And again, Campbell’s performance is a masterclass in committed minimalism. She is doing the equivalent of hauling a sofa up six flights of stairs because the elevator is busy being a metaphor.
But if you’re going to ask an audience to accept that the unknowable is the point, you have to give them something to hold while they’re unknowing—an escalating pattern, a moral puzzle that actually traps, a question sharpened to a point. “Lovely, Dark, and Deep” presents a forest that eats people and a bureaucracy that lets it. Then it shrugs, beautifully. It’s a shrug with great color grading and tasteful production design, to be fair, but it’s still a shrug. As a debut calling card for Sutherland’s control of tone and atmosphere, it’s promising. As a horror film you watch with your shoulders migrating toward your ears, it’s a nature walk sponsored by Ambien.
By the time the credits roll, the only mystery left unsolved is how a movie this drenched in portent can be so dehydrated of fear. If you’re into long stares, soft drones, and ethical quandaries delivered by park rangers who sound like they’re apologizing for the snack machine eating your dollar, this is your banquet. For the rest of us, consider it a public-service announcement: when a national park promises an unforgettable experience, read the fine print, bring a buddy, and maybe choose the trail with a gift shop.
