Like Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, Richard Greenwood Jr.’s This Land hinges on a double-booked weekend rental property. Unlike Barbarian, This Land’s threat lives outside the home’s walls.
A year after losing their in-utero daughter to an assault, the mixed-race Owens spouses — a pragmatic, PTSD-afflicted nurse (Hostile Territory’s Natalie Whittle) and an ineffectual, NPR-addicted soy boy (Nazis at the Center of the Earth’s Adam Burch) — rent the Cortez Grove manor for the Fourth of July. They stay despite all the red flags: skinning shed out back, sink full of dirty dishes, blood seeping from the eyes of paintings in crooked picture frames, bowl of saltwater taffy in the living room …
But guess who’s also coming to dinner? Mr. and Mrs. Moss: a chaw-spittin’ (ptui!), flannel/camo-clad, deer-huntin’, deer-grillin’ redneck (John J. Pistone, whose part certainly would’ve gone to David Koechner under a more generous budget) and his Karen-esque wife (Mindy Montavon, #iKllr).
Having these mismatched peeps’ reservations all screwy is no accident. See, every four years, the townsfolk put on their best purple cloaks and have themselves a good ol’ fashioned blood sacrifice to honor “The Flayed One,” a misnomer for “corpse that looks like a human Slim Jim.” To the death!
What begins with pure cringe — a flashback of Whittle speaking in an unnatural manner to her belly’s unborn child — quickly becomes a moderately stimulating story of survival horror and satanic panic, spring-loaded with a couple of functional jump scares. It also makes hot-take statements on such triggering topics as our political divide, emotional trauma, economic inequality, gun control, abortion and — you betcha — race. Compared to like-minded, well-meaning indie thrillers of late, This Land’s makers comment on society without the hammer-slamming; it knows it doesn’t have the panache to pull off taking itself too seriously.
Lest you take This Land for a treatise, Greenwood’s first feature is exploitation first and foremost — so “most,” in fact, it contains the line, “According to the welcome book, it’s an Aztec death whistle.” (Plus, the Moss patriarch announces his teen daughter “done gone preggers.”) In other words, it’s aware of its limitations, so the third act leans hard toward delirium, especially with Garret Camilleri’s performance as the park ranger. That he stands on the opposite end of the tonal spectrum from Whittle’s fully grounded (prologue excepted) work? Eh, I had enough fun to forgive. —Rod Lott