BUGBEAR
2021 · 9m · United Kingdom
Directed by Matt Smith
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
As a desperate man tries to raise the money he owes a dangerous criminal, he finds something in the woods that will change him forever.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be a tired crime-debt thriller, but Smith's weirdness in the woods saves it—there's something genuinely unsettling lurking beneath the genre skin that most filmmakers would've sanded down into convention.
A competent genre exercise with clear debts to folk horror and psychological thriller traditions, though it doesn't quite achieve the formal precision or thematic depth that would elevate it beyond its modest ambitions.
Smith's choice to let the forest itself become the character—through sound design and negative space—transforms what could've been a flat crime story into something that breathes; that single decision to trust silence and suggestion over exposition is everything here.