By Simon Thompson
Director Mitchell Altieri and writer David Calbert’s Consumed is a forgettable and by the numbers piece of rural horror, which fails to leave a mark upon the audience after it’s finished. On paper Consumed is a movie which has many of the key ingredients for a good horror movie: it’s set in an isolated rural location, it has a heavy psychological and thematic underpinning, and antagonists which, through better scripting, could have really worked. Sadly, through generic writing and directing these elements are all squandered, and what is left is a characterless and frustrating final product.
Consumed tells the story of a couple named Jay and Beth (played by Mark Famiglietti and Courtney Halverson respectively) who decide to go on a camping trip to the woods to celebrate Beth’s cancer being in remission. As you can imagine, everything starts to go wrong from this point on, as Jay and Beth find themselves trapped between a wild Tom Hardy in The Revenant style madman ( Devon Sawa), and a sinister, skin stealing monster.
Credit is due where credit is due however, because the acting in this movie is of a pretty decent standard despite the lacklustre script. Courtney Halverson gives an understated and sympathetic performance as Beth, which allows the audience an insight into her struggles with terminal illness in a way that doesn’t reduce it to simply being a plot point. Devon Sawa’s performance as the woodsman is also excellent, with Sawa managing to strike a nice balance between hamming it up harder than multiple Nicolas Cages and also showcasing a great deal of restraint before the character’s true intentions have been fully revealed.
The cinematography by M.I. Littin-Menz really brings out the beauty of the film’s isolated rural location, allowing the audience to appreciate the stark yet dangerously remote beauty of the character’s surroundings. Where Littin-Menz’s work really shines, however, is in the movie’s dream sequences, where his use of different coloured filters and surreal heavy shadow to express what Beth is going through psychologically demonstrates a keen understanding of the need for bold art direction to convey a narrative’s themes.
In the script however, Calbert is content to string together a story containing all the various and relevant horror cliches without bringing anything fresh or exciting to them. By about the ten to fifteen minute mark anybody who has watched almost any horror movie made in the last four decades will be able to figure out the what, who, where and how of everything that is going to go wrong with the cognitive speed of a greedy terrier looking for stray Christmas confectionery. As a result of this you’re left feeling bored rather than scared, making it difficult to engender any atmosphere of dread in the audience whatsoever.
Sadly, Consumed is a movie which had a great deal of potential to work but dismally wastes its strongest assets. An unimaginative script by David Calbert and a lack of distinctive direction by Mitchell Altieri render Consumed into a forgettable and disposable watch, being neither a piece of so bad- it’s fantastic fun nor so poorly executed that it leaves you in awe of its incompetence.
Consumed is release on VOD on 16 August 2024.
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