A playful nod to John Carpenter’s The Thing, Nyla Innuksuk’s engaging horror-slash-coming-of-ager dreams up a spooky alien invasion on Pangnirtung, a snowy, mountainous Inuit hamlet situated on the Canadian territory of Baffin Island. This time around, the heroes of the story are a band of Indigenous girls who wield the hunting weapons of their ancestors with plenty of swagger against the bloodthirsty invaders.
Despite the limited budget, the designs of the monsters are genuinely terrifying. Once the parasitic predators succeed in taking the shapes of its hosts – which include both humans and animals – these masses of tentacles creepily slosh inside their victims, turning them into macabre skin sacks staggering towards their next prey. Sandwiched between the adrenaline-pumping chases, however, is teenage banter and squabbles, as the girls groan about being grounded or gossip about the hottest boy in school.
