100000 Acres of Pine
2020 · 7m · Denmark
Genres: horror, mystery, thriller
Ranger Megan Patel loses her brother Daniel under mysterious circumstances. Following his trail into a vast pine forest, she finds the trees shifting around her, arriving places with no memory of how she got there — as if something dark is pulling her deeper into the woods.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The forest-as-maze thing has been done to death, but the amnesia-between-cuts angle almost salvages it—almost. Ultimately it's too committed to mood and not committed enough to actually breaking the haunted-woods formula.
A competent exercise in atmospherics and dread that knows its lineage (folk horror, the uncanny landscape), though it doesn't quite achieve the formal rigor or compositional control that would elevate it beyond familiar thriller beats.
The editing strategy—cutting between scenes without transition, mirroring Megan's disorientation through genuine narrative gaps rather than just shaky cam—is the one choice that makes this feel like something rather than just another lost-in-the-woods story.