In short: Rust Creek (2018)

Warning: vague structural spoilers ahead!

On her way driving to a job interview in Washington, college student Sawyer (Hermione Corfield) gets very lost in the woods of Kentucky. Even worse, while trying to get her bearings, she encounters two of the local male populace who clearly have very untoward designs on her. She manages to fight them off, but gets wounded in the process and has to flee into the woods, without any idea on how to get back to civilization or really, just survive. And this will turn out to be only the beginning of her ordeal.

Because, and here come the spoilers, while one might very well expect Jen McGowan’s Rust Creek to be a backwoods horror movie with a survivalist bent, it does turn into a very different film once it has gotten going, partially becoming one of these American rural crime films concerned with criminals who aren’t quite as clever as they think they are and the escalation of violence resulting from their misguided plans. But here, too, McGowan tends to take interesting detours from the genre standards, never completely going down the road of deconstructing the genres she’s working in, but rather inhabiting them in what feels like a more personal way. While she’s certainly no slouch in the thriller-style scenes that start and end the film, McGowan particularly excels in the calmer moments, in the careful eye she has for the unspoken nuances in the developing relationship between Sawyer and her rescuer/kidnapper Lowell (Jay Paulson), or the deft way she slowly reveals what exactly hides behind the simpleton good old boy surface of the local sheriff (Sean O’Bryan).


I also very much appreciate how deeply the film trusts its audience to understand the things it hints at instead of making explicit, like Lowell’s backstory as told through environmental details, a half-sentence and a couple of glances. There’s a self-assured feeling to the whole of Rust Creek, a confidence that’s very much justified by the resulting film.