Hiking, Therapy, and One Very Bad Forest Spirit
Bruce Wemple’s The Retreat is the kind of movie that starts like a low-budget outdoorsy hangout film and gradually mutates into “what if guilt had antlers and liked to stalk you in the snow?”
On the surface: two dudes go winter backpacking in the Adirondacks. Underneath: grief, regret, and a wendigo-shaped mental breakdown. The result is a lean, icy little horror film that punches above its budget and quietly gnaws on your nerves while pretending it’s just about fresh air and friendship.
It’s basically a wellness retreat from hell—zero yoga, all existential terror.
Two Guys, One Trail, Zero Good Decisions
The setup is beautifully simple:
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Gus (Grant Schumacher) is clearly not okay. He’s carrying more emotional baggage than his actual pack.
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Adam (Dylan Grunn) is the friend who had the brilliant idea that a brutal winter hike is exactly what a distressed person needs. As therapy strategies go, this is bold.
They head into the Adirondack High Peaks—snow, isolation, no cell reception, everything horror needs to thrive. The film doesn’t overload the early scenes; we get hints of what’s eating Gus (relationship issues, emotional fallout, possible trauma), but the full picture comes together gradually.
The dynamic between the two feels natural: joking, bickering, quietly concerned. Adam’s that friend who’s trying very hard to “fix” you without really knowing how, and Gus is that friend who keeps saying he’s fine when he’s absolutely not. It’s painfully relatable even before the supernatural shows up.
The Wendigo: Antlers, Hunger, and Mental Illness
The wendigo is one of horror’s most misused creatures—often reduced to “generic deer demon.” The Retreat does something smarter: it treats the wendigo as both monster and metaphor.
Gus starts experiencing strange phenomena:
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Visions in the trees
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Distorted sounds in the howling wind
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Flickers of something not-quite-human lurking just out of reach
We’re never allowed to fully relax into “this is 100% real” or “this is all in his head.” The film happily lives in that uncomfortable middle ground. The wendigo feels like:
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A manifestation of guilt
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A symbol of devouring grief
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And also, very possibly, a real problem with claws
It’s the perfect horror device for a story about a guy who’s already psychologically frayed. Even when you do see the creature, the residue of doubt remains: is this a myth come to life, or Gus’s brain weaponizing folklore against him?
Adirondack Anxiety: The Location Does Half the Work
One of the film’s biggest assets is its setting. Shooting in the Adirondack winter isn’t just pretty—it’s mean.
You get:
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Endless white landscapes that feel empty and crushing at the same time
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Bare, skeletal trees that always seem to be watching
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A constant sense that if the wendigo doesn’t get you, frostbite will
The snow isn’t just backdrop; it’s an active threat. Every misstep feels dangerous. Every shadow on the white ground seems like it shouldn’t be there. That kind of environment is perfect for a psychological horror story—there’s nowhere to hide, and nowhere to go that feels safer than where you are.
The film uses that isolation well. When Gus starts slipping, you understand immediately why that’s terrifying: there are no witnesses, no bystanders, no convenient exits. Just wilderness, your thoughts, and something hungry.
Small Cast, Big Impact
With such a contained story, the performances carry a lot of weight, and The Retreat lucks out.
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Grant Schumacher as Gus does a great slow unravel. He doesn’t jump straight to panic; he slides into it. You see the denial, the confusion, the flashes of anger and fear. He looks like a guy trying desperately to hold himself together while something claws away from the inside.
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Dylan Grunn as Adam is the grounded counterpoint. He starts off as the more outgoing, upbeat one, but as the situation deteriorates, his own fear starts to bleed through. Watching his belief in “this can still be fine” die is its own little horror arc.
The supporting cast—therapist, friends, fragments of Gus’s life—appear in flashbacks and intercuts that gradually fill in the emotional context. They’re not there to steal the show; they’re there to show you what Gus has already lost before he ever went into the woods.
Structure: Horror as a Slow Freeze
The film’s pacing is deliberate. Some people will call it “slow”; others will correctly call it “a long panic attack in snowshoes.”
The first act feels almost like a character drama with an ominous soundtrack:
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Banter in the car
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Campsite setup
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A few eerie sounds, easily written off
Then the weirdness starts ramping, and the narrative structure starts looping in Gus’s therapy sessions, flashes of memory, and fractured reality. We’re inside his head more and more, and that’s not a place anyone should stay unsupervised.
The line between present and past blurs, and the wendigo becomes less a visiting monster and more a constant presence, like the worst possible third wheel on a hiking trip. By the final act, you’re not entirely sure which version of events is “true”—and that’s precisely the point.
Dark Humor: Nature, But Make It Passive-Aggressive
Despite the grim subject matter, there’s a thread of dark humor in how the movie plays with bros-in-the-woods tropes:
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The idea that “getting outside” is a cure-all for mental health, right up until the outdoors starts trying to kill you.
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The earnest optimism of Adam dragging Gus into a snow-covered death maze because “fresh air will help.”
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The irony that the thing that was supposed to be grounding and healing becomes the stage for a complete psychological collapse.
It never devolves into comedy, but there are definitely moments where you can’t help but think:
“This is what happens when you skip actual therapy and go straight to REI.”
Practical Monster, Practical Stakes
When you do get to see more of the wendigo, it’s satisfyingly physical—there’s weight, presence, texture. No floaty CGI nonsense. It feels like something that could actually crash through the trees and tear into you, which is reassuring only in the sense that at least your death would be concrete.
The horror isn’t about saving the world or breaking an ancient curse. The stakes are intimate: Gus’s sanity, his life, and his friendship with Adam. That scale fits the monster. You don’t need the wendigo rampaging through a city; it’s much scarier hunting two guys who can’t even agree on how bad the situation is.
Trauma Wearing a Monster Mask
What makes The Retreat stick isn’t just the creature; it’s the way the story uses that creature as a lens on unresolved trauma. The wendigo is:
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Guilt that won’t let you rest
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Grief that keeps circling back
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Self-destructive impulses given claws
Gus isn’t some random victim. He brought his mess into the woods, and the woods replied, “Oh, we can work with this.”
The film doesn’t lecture or over-explain. It just keeps cutting between the man Gus wants to be, the things he’s done, and the thing that’s now stalking him. By the time the credits roll, you feel like you’ve watched someone lose a fight not just against a monster, but against himself.
Final Verdict: Small, Mean, and Worth the Trip
The Retreat (2020) is a compact, icy slice of horror that makes the most of its limited cast and chilly setting. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it doesn’t have to—it just straps that wheel to a wendigo and rolls it over your nerves for 80 minutes.
If you like horror that:
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mixes creature-feature chills with psychological unease,
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trades jump scares for creeping dread,
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and isn’t afraid to suggest that “just get outside more” is terrible mental health advice,
then this is absolutely worth checking out.
Just maybe think twice before planning a winter hiking trip with your most emotionally fragile friend afterward. Or at least make sure none of you have recently wronged any ancient forest spirits.
