The Birch

The scouts

Here's the thing—summoning ancient forest entities to settle playground beef is a premise everyone would greenlight, which is exactly why Melton and Franklin shouldn't have. The film executes it with too much reverence for its own mythology, missing the chance to genuinely pervert either the bullying narrative or the grimoire tradition.

A competent synthesis of folk-horror lineage and bildungsroman, pitched with formal confidence in its mythic register—the filmmakers understand the grammar of the supernatural-as-reckoning. The spell-work aesthetics sit comfortably within a tradition stretching from Roeg to contemporary elevated horror, though without particular innovation within that conversation.

The entire film hinges on a single sound design choice—the moment the incantation shifts from whispered vulnerability to something ancient and *wrong*—and Melton and Franklin commit fully to that tonal pivot, which is what transforms a familiar curse narrative into something with genuine dread and specificity on a five-minute budget.