‘Never trust the surly feral kid” should be up there with “don’t have sex” and “ignore the late-night phone call” as crucial horror-movie life advice. That’s where hiker Wyndham (Scott Haze), out in the wilds photographing an eclipse, goes wrong in this horror-fringed thriller. Lured away from his car by Orion (Charlie Avink), who claims his parents have gone awol, Wyndham becomes lost and takes refuge in a tin shack at the bottom of a canyon. It’s inhabited by Alina (Kate Lyn Sheil), a blank young woman who offers him soup of dubious provenance.
The next morning, Alina is oddly nonplussed when the ladder leading back to the top has disappeared. They are both prisoners of a gang of demented youths who live in “the palace” up yonder, and who literally micturate on Wyndham’s attempts to climb the sandstone cliff-face. With nothing doing, he and Alina form a kind of perverse Edenic couple, as she marks the passage of time on her bedroom wall with menstrual blood. But not for long: her belly starts to swell, and despite her attempts to lull him into joining her in acquiescence, Wyndham again starts bridling against his predicament.
