Who Goes There?
2020 · 24m
Directed by Astrid Thorvaldsen
Genres: historical, horror, thriller
Minnesota, 1880: three Norwegian sisters living alone on a desolate prairie are tested when a stranger claiming to be a doctor arrives as the youngest sister lies dying, and the eldest's decision to let him in admits a supernatural force across her threshold.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's *technically* a folk-horror threshold narrative—the kind of thing that makes you expect a certain breed of audience—but Thorvaldsen refuses the cathartic payoff those people want, which is genuinely infuriating in the best way.
A meticulous piece of literary adaptation that understands the mythic register of frontier isolation and invites comparison to both the Carpenter lineage and the Norse sagas that clearly haunt its DNA; the restraint here is harder than spectacle.
The decision to keep the doctor's true nature ambiguous—letting dread live in the eldest sister's *doubt* rather than in reveal—does the entire emotional work of the film on a shoestring, and it's masterful.