“Terror is a place.” That ambiguous tagline for Joseph Sims-Dennett’s The Banished reflects the film’s imprecise and ungraspable attempt at woodland horrors. Think Sator, The Interior, or last year’s Lovely, Dark, and Deep. One character’s venture into uninhabited forestation doubles as a psychological excavation of repressed traumas and hidden fears. Sims-Dennett tries to rearchitect nature’s quietest landscapes as an unknown purgatory, but this is where he fails. The Banished is never forthcoming with its messages or intentions, leaving audiences struggling to find any direction, like a lost hiker without cell service, a map, or a compass.
Meg Clarke stars as protagonist Grace Jennings, a woman drowning in despair. Her father recently passed, her brother David (Gautier de Fontaine) is missing, and David’s last whereabouts harbor a dark secret. With the help of her old teacher, Mr. Green (Leighton Cardno), Grace is led into the surrounding woods in search of David. What she finds is, well, an unfathomable and threatening journey. That much you can presume since you’re reading this review on Bloody Disgusting.
If that sounds underbaked, bingo. The Banished leans on the presentation of a fractured timeline to hopefully convince audiences that Grace’s experience is far more complicated than reality. Not a whole lot happens in terms of action, because Sims-Dennett is obsessed with artsy montages of silver-painted dead bodies, Sam Powyer’s abstract cinematography, and imagery meant to reflect Grace’s unsettled mind. The story unnecessarily jumps around in chronology to—fingers crossed—spice up the one-woman hike, but it’s an overused technique that undermines basic narrative functionality. Substance evaporates as pretension rolls in like a haze-coating fog, trumped by a mindless parade of clip-show photography that supersedes structure and development.
Ideas are a jumble of quick hits, but even worse, leave anticipated frights behind. The Banished is not a scary movie, nor does Grace convey palpable paranoia. Sims-Dennett wrestles with domestic issues as driving themes—the hurdles we leap over for family versus the scars left by loved ones—but it’s a pointless, or at least unaware, examination. Tauese Tofa’s droning score moans through scene after scene of Grace wandering down branch-covered trails, desperately trying to summon an iota of tension that never appears. There are scary elements, from bloodshed to culty teases, but they’re never employed scarily. It’s not just Grace who is clueless, but Sims-Dennett seems unaware of how to navigate the horror genre.
If there’s a bright spot, it’s Clarke. She’s a competent lead who stomachs her character’s emotional burdens. Grace is plagued by typical obstacles of outdoorsy thrillers, from sustained injuries to odd noises while camping at night, and Clarke’s reactions are on point. Issues arise not because of her empowered yet unprepared performance, but Sims-Dennett’s undefinable vision. There’s a difference between filmmakers refusing to spoon-feed audiences and movies that lose their own plots to mindless self-indulgence.
It’s a shame, because you can sense that Sims-Dennett pulls The Banished from a personal profundity that doesn’t translate. Cinema should be expressive and painful, yet also relatable and decipherable. The Banished leaves audiences climbing a mountain of questions after an especially head-scratching third act, like Sims-Dennett forgets that we’re not telepathically tethered to explanations and motivations in his head. Sadly, we’re left with a deceptively shallow and unthoughtful take on “trauma horror” that leaves viewers begging for clarity that doesn’t exist.
The Banished is now available on VOD and in select theaters.
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