True North
2022 · 18m
Directed by Brian Mitchell, Ian Start
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A drifter follows a mysterious voicemail from his soon-to-be ex-wife and discovers she has joined a cult that claims to have brought their deceased child back.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A cult-resurrection thriller that treats its absurd premise—dead child brought back by True Believers—with zero irony and complete sincerity; most scouts will recoil at the premise's pulp DNA, which is exactly why it works as subversive genre work.
The film's formal restraint—its refusal to sensationalize the cult or milk cheap scares—locates it in a lineage of slow-burn psychological horror that prizes mood over mechanics, though the tonal balancing act between thriller propulsion and contemplative dread occasionally feels uncertain.
The decision to let the voicemail itself do the heavy narrative lifting—a disembodied voice carrying all the emotional weight and mystery—forces both the protagonist and viewer into genuine uncertainty, and that structural choice elevates what could've been genre schlock into something psychologically precise.