Caleb Rourke

Seven minutes in a fire lookout tower and the scare is a radio. That is it. No creature, no reveal, just a voice that answers slightly too fast. I have watched a lot of horror proofs of concept and most of them are an idea for a trailer. This one is an idea for a film.

Shot at sensitivities that should not hold and mostly they do. There is noise in the sky and the film leaves it in, which I respect, because cleaning it up would have made the whole thing look like a phone. Grain belongs to night. Somebody made a decision here and stuck to it for seventeen minutes.

Seventeen minutes of the hours between two and five in the morning at the edge of a town, and the coyotes are barely in it. Mostly it is sprinklers, a paper route, a woman doing tai chi in a car park. I have put this on for people who tell me they do not like documentaries. It works every time.

I admire the patience and I do not believe the ending. Rourke builds ninety minutes of specific, physical, unglamorous work and then reaches for a genre gesture that belongs to a different film. The cast is excellent. The sound of the camp is excellent. I wanted it to trust its own boredom all the way to the end, and it blinked.

Ninety seven minutes in a logging camp and for the first forty of them nothing happens except work. That is the trap. By the time something does happen you know exactly how heavy everything is, how far the truck is, how long the walk back takes. The dread is engineering. The last act loses its nerve slightly. The first two do not.