Backcountry

Backcountry thrives in the close-quarter details: the verbal knife-pricks of a dying relationship, the jangling impact of the smallest sounds breaking silence, that dread certainty that you're completely lost and it's getting dark.

"Backcountry" inevitably brings on the bloody, but it finds atmospheric ways to depict how the bucolic hush of a nature getaway can morph into a survival nightmare for the unprepared.

A couple of weekend backpackers face off against man and beast in director Adam MacDonald's accomplished, blunt-force wilderness adventure.

It's beautifully tense and well-acted - the kind of modest genre picture we don't see enough of these days.

Apparently inspired by a true story that the movie made me very much not want to look up, which I suppose may be taken by some to be a token of its effectiveness.

Backcountry ultimately feels like a short film that's been clumsily expanded to a feature-length running time.

Backcountry will make some think twice about going into the woods for vacation.

The film's main source of anxiety remains the lone, terrified figure, thoroughly unprepared for the savage beast who attacks, and faced at last by an uncaring natural world.

MacDonald does a nice job of building up to an emotional finale that doesn't betray his dedication to brutal realism.

Given that most killer bear movies are either intentionally cheesy or unwittingly inept, it's nice to see a new one that takes the concept seriously and forgoes easy splatter in favor of some strong, simple, sustained suspense.

Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you, as the philosopher Sam Elliott said. Backcountry succeeds by not straying far from that core belief.