'Consumed' Is Lost in Its Own Woods

By Lindsay Traves | Film | August 15, 2024 |

Consumed opens with a vibe that’s scenic and severe, framing its troubles subject. It’s the woods, they’re beautiful and mysterious in a way that makes them both promising and menacing, a tone this film tries to wrap around itself throughout. I wish it’d succeeded in maintaining that beyond its opening shots.

The aforementioned subject, Beth (Courtney Halverson), is on a trip through these woods with her husband, Jay (Mark Famiglietti). The two are trying to recover from the shift in their dynamic that came about when Beth was diagnosed with cancer and underwent difficult treatment. On their minorly harrowing camping trip, Beth seems not to want to be perceived as delicate while Jay wants simply to help his wife along by carrying her bags and checking on her health. Jay isn’t just trying to manage his perceived version of her fragility; he is also trying to have her understand the affect the fragility and the treatment had on him. Through their hikes through the woods and difficult conversations, the experienced pair stumbles upon the signs of a novel predator, forcing them to consider getting out of dodge. Finding themselves at the mercy of the cruel elements (and the mysterious predator), the two are desperate enough to beg for solace from a strange cave dweller (Devon Sawa). An injured Jay and a deteriorating Beth are thus saved by and in the hands of a mad modern caveman hunting a supernatural beast.

After the first act, Jay is mostly forced onto the sidelines so that Beth can act as a hero alongside the mysterious man of the woods who seems prepped and ready to hunt the beast. It’s meant to be her story of survival. That story is supposed to be bolstered by flashes to a dreamlike take on her experience with cancer that seems desperate to add genre levels to this simple story of the prey and their hunter. The dream-like imagery and supernatural/ alien predator treatment seems to shove Consumed into the territory of Significant Other or more generously, Annihilation, but it never goes all the way into crafting the metaphor and instead reads as a clunky mashup where neither genre seems resolved. There are smatterings of lore with overused genre terms that made me beg for relief all in service of making more out of the predator and trying it to the characters’ internal struggles.

Sawa, of course, is a welcome sight, him continuing to pop up in genre media and always committing at every level. It’s somewhat of a return to form, him coming off his turn in 2020s Hunter Hunter, a twisty (and twisted) but simple story of wilderness dwellers who think they’re being tracked by a wolf. It’s hard for anyone to command the spotlight from him, even when he’s cloaked in animal pelts while the lead is zoomed in on in FX makeup.
Director, Mitchell Altieri, seems to thrive in schlock, having directed April Fools Day and The Night Watchmen. I can’t say I am deeply familiar with his body of work, but this seems a departure from the violent-horror-party flicks he seems to typically create. It’d otherwise be admirable but there’s an obvious gap between the budget friendly horror flick and the serious sci-fi that Altieri was not able to fill.

This latest heady midnighter feels as lost in the woods as its leads, not quite successfully tying together the science fiction stories of resilience and grief with that of a super predator from beyond our understanding. There are some interesting things woven into the science fiction nature story but they are mired by flimsy references to illness and grief that are reaching for a much cleverer feature than this movie has the time to be.

Consumed hits limited theaters August 16, 2024