Desolation follows a widow, her son, and her best friend as they hike up the mountains that her recently deceased husband used to frequent, to scatter his ashes. As they make their way back, they quickly realize they are not alone.
I went into Desolation not expecting much, and I got exactly that. This movie was not bad by any means, but I definitely would not call it good. It got a lot of things right where most B movies get very wrong, but it also fell into a lot of B movie tropes and fell flat during some crucial scenes. It was one of those movies where you knew exactly what was going to happen from start to finish but it did have suspenseful moments regardless.
First off, Desolation had surprisingly good acting, but it was unfortunately undercut by terrible dialogue. It was an odd mix because usually, both are pretty bad, but both actresses handled the cliché script they were given very well, and despite the shallow dialogue clearly meant to spoon feed exposition to the audience, they made the characters unique and delivered the lines convincingly. Toby Nichols, the son, didn’t really have the same opportunity because his lines were so overtly cliché that they could have put anybody in that role and they would have delivered it exactly the same. He played the “kid whose dad just died and doesn’t want to be treated like a baby” with such lines as “Hey, my dad just died, but stop treating me like a baby.”
The cinematography was also really good for a low budget movie. There were a lot of beautiful landscapes that made me feel that sense of adventure you get from watching a good nature documentary, but it also highlighted the solitude of the three main characters which made being followed by a stranger that much scarier. Where would they go? The characters didn’t have to explain the hopelessness of their situation because the cinematography did that for you. There was, however, a lot of inconsistency between day and night between shots. It would seemingly go from night to day pretty much on a whim. As they walked to a destination that was only a couple miles away, it went from the dead of night to early morning on several occasions and it would catch me off guard every time.
As with most everything in this film, they did a lot of good things with the villain, but also a lot of bad. The last thing you want to see while hiking in the woods is a strange man stalking you, so the villain is inherently terrifying. It was when they made him into a cartoony version of what a horror villain is, that he became laughable. He always played old-timey music on a handheld radio while he “worked,” had an expressionless face, and he wears his sunglasses at night so he can, so he can…nobody knows the rest of that song. They did a good job of building up the suspense and keeping the audience guessing where the stalker was, but every time there were scenes of him actually attacking the timing felt off. The cuts were too slow, the angles were too wide, and worst of all the audio sounded like everything was happening underwater, which makes me think it was a last-minute adjustment in post that didn’t work out right.
I could nitpick this movie all day, there were a lot of small things that didn’t make sense throughout the film, but ultimately I think it was entertaining and it definitely surprised me. I was expecting a god awful hour and eighteen minutes of my life, instead, I got some really good outdoor scenery, some suspense, and better than average acting from two-dimensional characters.
