Don't really get the low rating. If you treat this movie accordinglly, as an independent horror flick, you probably will be satisfied in some way...of course if you have a taste for those kinda things)
First of all this is not your conventional monster movie with lots of gore, blood and creature in a shot. Creature is present though, but its role is secondary. What is crucial here is a portrait of a small town under testing circumstances. So even the movie's atmosphere has more like psychological thriller's vibes, rather than horror's mood. Besides the fact that there are several characters in the story, the whole narative pivots around one person, which is an obvious standout here either as a character in the plot or as a performance. Drew Matthews really shines here, giving this authentic maybe even unic portrayal of socially awkward loner with a mysterious trauma in his childhood, which is unvailed only closer to the end. Fair warning here, the film's runtime is close to two hours, so if you don't enjoy the first half of it, there's no need for you to endure the whole thing, course you won't see anything drastically new or plotchanging in the second act. Everything is kinda logical here, considering indie horror-thriller logic occuring of course. Perhaps even for me the ending was a downside, despite the fact I kinda saw where it was going. Maybe it actually was the key problem for me, so I couldn't give the movie a higher mark. Deep in my heart I still wanted to see some sort of climax, a gamechanger, a little explotion in the narrative, something more emotional and powerful. Unfortunately the movie keeps its pace and its direction, not to say it makes it worse, it just made it a little bit underwhelming for me personally.
In a nutshell The Arbors is a good example of independent horror-thriller with grim and stringy depressing atmosphere and top-notch cinematography, it never tries to mimic anything, choses its own path and reaches its destination with dignity, which gives it credit. Visually creature is effective, especially keeping in mind that it's nothing like big money involved hollywood project, but an independent one, shot with tight budget. Also it's the director's full meter debut and he's setting a pretty high bar here, so I'm looking forward to seeing his following works.
