The locals call it “hills fever”; the Indigenous community in the isolated Oregon mountain country where Blake (Christopher Abbott) grew up named it “face of the wolf”. The labels vary, but the rumour persists: an infectious disorder that transforms sufferers into unrecognisable monsters with slavering jaws, sprouting thickets of body hair and a taste for human flesh. With that in mind, you may think that returning to the gloomy farmstead he fled as a teen might not be high on Blake’s to-do list. But city life is grinding him down, and he decides that a visit to the country might just shore up his crumbling marriage to Charlotte (Julia Garner) and make some treasured memories with his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth).
It’s a promising package. Director Leigh Whannell (The Invisible Man) takes genre schlock reassuringly seriously; Abbott and Garner are consistently excellent; the central idea, of the threat that lurks at the heart of the family, is intriguing. But the film soon runs out of bite, with a plot that repeatedly chews over the same thumps, bumps and rattled doors, and the same shadowy menace in underlit basements.
