Trying to carry on with her studies, a college student takes a vacation with several friends to a remote lakeside cabin where she finds herself stalked by a vicious spirit tied to the ancestral land itself and must uncover the reason for the spirit's presence before it harms her friends.
Overall, this was a fairly solid and chilling genre effort. Among the better features of this one stems from the immensely chilling setup that provides a great opportunity to mesh together several impressive storylines. The main focus on the location brings up a slew of racial and ethical issues between the friends, the second they arrive, with the two white girls using their implied privilege and money to hold court over the other two, who are of a lower economic status than they are, which starts to remind the one girl of her teachings. The treatment and comments about everything that stirs up her connections to what happened on the land in the past, which is eventually revealed as the starting point for the hallucinations and visions that she experiences whenever that comes up in their interactions, so that everything is highlighted rather heavily in the end. By the time it starts to deal with the other big issue here involving the generation of the cursed figure haunting the property, the film's shift into a full-blown genre effort finally takes place. Those initial encounters around the Gothic mansion that point to something happening when she has frantic visions or hallucinations around the house about the creatures swarming around the pit in the ground that haunts her sets about the final half where the reveal of the whole thing comes together in a fun possession scene involving the main figure utilizing their powers to strike back at the others around her. This features some intriguing action setpieces and ideas that play into how that comes together in a flurry of activity to give this one quite a lot to like. There aren't a whole lot of issues here that bring this one down. The main drawback to be had with this one is the bizarre setup that tends to provide it with very little genre fare for large stretches of the running time. Not only are the interactions with the friend group hard to get through because of how heavily it tries to beat the racism into the heads of everyone, but it also forgets to include much in the way of context for what's going on with things just happening, and little to no context. It's almost impossible to get a name for the figure doing all the haunting, and there's even less about the purpose for attacking the group who are not responsible for what's going on, so this all feels somewhat underwhelming and quite puzzling. With an alarmingly lackadaisical finale that renders many of the connections moot for little reason other than to give it a sensible wrap-up, these are what manage to hold it together overall.
Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Violence.
