Movies
The Canyon
“Their collective stupidity is so thick and overbearing, you can’t help but want to see them plunge to their deaths. If only Michael Berryman would simply show up and dispatch them all.”
This review contains spoilers.
Part of the early allure of The Canyon comes with trying to decide exactly where it’s headed. But once the movie finally reveals its chosen path, one can’t help but want to return to base camp. Elopers Nick and Lori decide to spontaneously honeymoon in the Grand Canyon. Stymied by a lack of backcountry permits, the newlyweds are forced to turn to character actor Will Patton—a grizzled, self-described “guide extraordinaire”—for assistance. Following a vague agreement at a local bar, Patton the Super Guide indeed keeps his word, leading the couple on a picturesque mule ride down the canyon, only to be suddenly batted out of the movie by a gnarly rattlesnake attack.
With Will Patton surprisingly (and sadly) taken out of the equation in the first 30 minutes, the naïve yuppies are left to their own devices out in the big bad desert. And here The Canyon forks, taking the audience down the road far less interesting. What could potentially develop into a “ghostly guide comes back from the dead” scenario—or maybe even a “crazy clan of violently inbreeding desert rapists run amok” situation—eventually gives way to a simple and extremely boring man vs. nature survival story.
Eion Bailey (Band of Brothers; Mindhunters) is unrealistically smug and content in the role of Nick. Lost in the desert without food or water with his new wife, he still finds a way to half-smirk his way through every single scene, remaining irritatingly upbeat even in the worst of circumstances. And don’t even get me started on Lori (Yvonne Strahovski; Chuck), a nagging shrew of a spouse who wails like a banshee through the whole heinous ordeal. First she balks when her husband takes a snoot of Will Patton’s road liquor, then she bitches about her kitchen colors back home, and then she starts whining about how much she wants pizza. The Canyon is like a crazy mash-up of 1997’s The Edge and an episode of The Nanny. If you removed all the whining and smirking, the movie would be 45 minutes long.
Even worse, the infuriating script paints every character as learning disabled—or at the very least, severely common-sense-impaired—to the point of audience exasperation. After wandering aimlessly through the desert for a day, Nick and Lori find their path blocked by a seemingly insurmountable 100-foot cliff. Undeterred, they decide to scale the cliff face—without ropes—only to have Lori pause 40-feet up to spontaneously check her cell phone, discover that she’s finally got a signal, and attempt to call 911, all while Nick tenuously grips her hand to keep her from falling. Their collective stupidity is so thick and overbearing, you can’t help but want to see them plunge to their deaths. If only Michael Berryman would simply show up and dispatch them all.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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