Slash/Back

The feature debut of director/co-writer Nyla Innuksuk is also the first film shot in the Inuit settlement of Pangnirtung in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Canada. It's a place where the sun never sets during the summer months and, though located on Baffin Island—the fifth-largest island in the world—the population is small. All of this makes for a unique and exciting setting for a daylight horror movie. Slash/Back centers on a group of spirited, independent Inuit teenage girls, many of whom have grown tired of and detached from their parents, their culture, and the magnificent Arctic vistas they grew up with. Seeing these endless snow-covered mountains in the picture's opening sequences will remind most movie lovers of the Antarctic setting of John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror masterpiece The Thing. That connection is intentional, for this Artic world has been invaded by an alien presence that takes the forms of human and animal hosts.

Unfortunately, aside from the setting and the subtext inherent to any story about Indigenous heroes fighting off invaders, Slash/Back doesn't do much beyond tapping all the expected narrative beats of a very familiar story. That it references several other movies that did bring fresh perspectives to well-trod material—like Shaun of the Dead and Attack the Block—only reinforces what's lacking here. Of course, Slash/Back is a very low-budget picture, and it leans into that obvious fact in some effective and some not-so-effective ways. The most impressive is the way the humans who've been taken over by aliens move. The possessed people are played by contortionists in simple, but effectively creepy, rubber masks. The principal alien performer here is Canadian internet sensation "Twisty" Troy James, who has made a career out of creating freaky monster characters without the use of CGI. If only Innuksuk applied that skilled analogue aesthetic across the board but in her film, unfortunately, most of the creature effects in Slash/Back are achieved with either bad CGI or Halloween pop-up store-level puppets.

One's appreciation for this picture will depend upon whether you find it charmingly homemade or unforgivably amateurish. The uneven performances of the teen actors pulled me into the latter camp, I'm afraid. The young ensemble, ranging from age 11 to 17, are all non-professional actors whom Innuksuk found by setting up acting workshops in the area for local girls and then working with the kids she cast to develop the script. When filmmakers collaborate in this way there seems to be an idea that it will bring a project a special level of legitimacy. The logic, I guess, is that a movie about kids can't be inauthentic if the kids were involved in its creation. But just because young people are involved in a film's creation does not make it any less of a problem if the results are stiff, derivative and cliche. As someone who made many films with kids for years myself, I know that the first job is to get past the inherent desire in many of them to give you what they think you want, which will almost always ring hollow. The biggest tell for this is when you hear young people use contemporary slang and it ends up sounding like when parents try to co-opt their children's lingo ("that was totally cray, like cray cray!"). A few of the leads in Slash/Back do a fine job creating lived-in characters, but too many of the others just look like kids with a camera pointed at them, delivering awkward dialogue in an uncomfortably self-aware manner. Innuksuk has made no bones about the fact that Slash/Back was made for teen audiences, and I'm guessing teens will enjoy the picture. But it's hard for me not to see it as a missed opportunity to create something far greater.

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