In short: The Shasta Triangle (2019)

In the 90s, Paula’s (Dani Lennon) weird scientist father – he worked for DARPA, apparently – disappeared in the woods around Mount Shasta, during one of the recurring phases when that place is haunted by high strangeness, in this case particularly in form of inexplicable noises. Twenty years later, again an inexplicable noise can be heard in the area; again, people disappear under mysterious circumstances. Paula, following a lot of therapy and armed with her father’s coded notebook, does return, too, trying to disprove her dad’s theories about holes in reality leading to other dimensions to gain some peace of mind. She teams up with her foster sister – now the local sheriff – Sam (Ayanna Berkshire), who is clearly the voice of reason kind of person you want to have by your side in times of stress. Paula and Sam do get other companions too, though, for a couple of old childhood friends (Deborah Smith, Madeline Merritt and Helenna Santos) decide to just drop by and join in the project of going into the woods and hopefully not finding anything weird. You can imagine how that’s going to turn out.

Going by the couple of reviews I’ve seen and the painfully low IMDB ratings of The Shasta Triangle, I didn’t go into Barry W. Levy’s film with terribly high expectations. However, it turns out to be a perfectly decent movie, not exactly transcending the indie bracket its in where half of the people involved fill three or more roles in a production, but making a fun showing of it nonetheless.

It’s at the very least a film made to perfectly competent standards of filmmaking, with proper editing, writing that’s seldom awkward, acting that’s always competent and never awkward, photography that gets the job it is there for done, effective sound design and staging that suggests everyone involved simply knew what they were doing on the level of basic craftsmanship. This may not sound like much, but it already guarantees a film that flows properly and knows how to tell its small scale story of weird shit happening to perfectly nice women in an effective manner.

Often the film’s actually better than this suggests, Levy and company making good use of simple visual set-ups to suggest the distortions of time and space our protagonists have to deal with, creating an effective mood of light strangeness. With my specific tastes, I also can’t help but like a film making use of the sort of Fortean phenomenon this deals in without resorting to the shriller elements of conspiracy theory, letting the weird stuff stand on its own.


The Shasta Triangle is a simple, but not stupid, little movie, neither overstaying its welcome nor getting too ambitious for its possibilities.