Audiences love tales that pit plucky children in opposition to horrible monsters — whether or not it’s aliens, zombies, ghosts, or numerous different supernatural threats. There’s a lot love for these tales, actually, that it takes a particular type of movie to face out within the crowded “kids vs. monsters” style as of late.

Director Nyla Innuksuk’s Slash/Back is one such movie, and it delivers a uniquely intelligent, creepy-fun journey, led by a proficient forged of younger actors.

Rough however actual

The first feature-length movie from Innuksuk, Slash/Back is about and shot within the Inuit hamlet of Pangnirtung in Nunavut, Canada. The movie follows a gaggle of younger ladies, performed by Tasiana Shirley, Alexis Wolfe, Nalajoss Ellsworth, and Chelsea Prusky, who uncover a lethal alien creature threatening their tiny, distant group. They take it upon themselves to cease the extraterrestrial invader with a mixture of makeshift weapons, horror-movie savvy, and the abilities they’ve discovered rising up within the place they name “Pang.”

Nearly the whole forged of Slash/Back was recruited from Pangnirtung and the encircling areas of Nunavut, and though their lack of performing expertise is clear within the movie, Innuksuk well weaves that high quality into the vitality of the movie. The major characters act and speak like the children they’re, regularly lamenting the boredom of life in Pang and discussing their respective native crushes, normally whereas looking at a telephone display. The casualness of the actors’ method provides a way of authenticity to the journey Innuksuk crafts round them, and even provides the movie a documentary-like vibe at instances, significantly in these moments when the alien-fighting children are merely being, nicely … children.

When the motion picks up, the ladies deal with the frantic moments much more comfortably, delivering some enjoyable performances because the self-appointed — and in some circumstances, reluctant — defenders of their village. The actors throw themselves into each the scares and campiness of all of it with an entertaining mix of dramatic (and generally amusingly overdramatic) sincerity and standard-issue teenage apathy.

Smart sourcing

In the best comparisons to make with Slash/Back, the movie delivers a mash-up of Joe Cornish’s 2011, London-set alien invasion movie Attack the Block and John Carpenter’s iconic, 1982 polar thriller The Thing.

Like Attack the Block, Innuksuk’s movie places the destiny of a group that doesn’t appear outwardly united into the fingers of essentially the most unlikely of saviors. And very like the adolescent gang in Cornish’s movie does, the children of Slash/Back couldn’t seemingly care much less about their little village. However, when circumstances (or extra precisely, lethal alien invaders) power them to reckon with their actual emotions about their neighbors, a unconscious swap is flipped that offers them a robust sense of objective and allegiance to the group they as soon as appeared determined to depart.

That evolution is especially enjoyable to look at with the younger forged of Slash/Back, whose rough-around-the-edges performing makes the characters’ pivot from angsty youngsters to alien-vanquishing heroes really feel a little bit extra trustworthy, because the roles they play by no means really feel that far distanced from their actuality.

Slash/Back additionally takes loads of cues from The Thing within the sense of isolation its distant setting and Innuksuk’s digital camera create, in addition to a number of the movie’s creature designs, which contain piles of slimy tentacles and ugly sensible results. The movie’s extraterrestrial monsters put on the pores and skin of their victims — each human and animal — as they invade Pang, and the movie is at its finest when it’s leaning into the work achieved by contortionists and intelligent costuming to offer the movie’s creatures a terrifying, bodily presence within the children’ world.

Unfortunately, that gritty, ’80s horror aesthetic of the aliens takes a little bit of successful when the movie depends too closely on digital results, as these components typically really feel a bit too polished and sharp for the world round them.

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