The Dyatlov Pass Incident (2013)
Directed by Renny Harlin
No — The Dyatlov Pass Incident is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Five Oregon college students travel to the Ural Mountains to document the Dyatlov Pass incident, and the film that results is a found footage thriller from 2013, directed by Renny Harlin with a cast of unknowns and an even split between men and women.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is a mix of unknown American and Russian actors with a roughly even gender split, but there is no deliberate diversity casting or commentary on representation.
A woman (Holly) serves as co-director and protagonist and another woman (Denise) is the sound engineer, but the film makes no feminist argument or statement.
No LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or themes appear anywhere in the film.
The film engages no racial themes or commentary; the cast is uniformly white and race is never addressed.
There is no environmental or climate-related content in the film.
The film contains no critique of capitalism, wealth, or class structures.
Body image, size, or self-acceptance themes are entirely absent.
Jensen is a conspiracy theorist with a past acid trip, but this is played for plot and horror, not as a depiction of neurodivergence.
The film invents a fictional government-experiment explanation for a real historical tragedy, but this is genre conspiracy plotting rather than ideologically motivated historical revisionism.
The film is a found-footage horror thriller with no didactic messaging or moral lecturing to the audience.
Why it received this score
Five Oregon college students travel to the Ural Mountains to document the Dyatlov Pass incident, and the film that results is a found footage thriller from 2013, directed by Renny Harlin with a cast of unknowns and an even split between men and women. Holly King and Jensen Day share directing duties, and Denise Evers runs the sound. These are working arrangements, not arguments. Nobody in the film stops to explain why a woman holds the camera, because nobody in the film finds it remarkable. The arrangement simply is.
The film's real business is the mystery itself, and it solves that mystery with mutants, a bunker, a wormhole, and a stack of files about the Philadelphia Experiment. The 1959 deaths of nine real hikers become raw material for a teleportation plot. That is a genre reflex, not a historical argument. The film has no thesis about the Soviet state, no lesson about the dead, and no interest in who they were. It wants to frighten us in a tunnel. It does so with competence and a human tongue found in a weather station.
The absences are equally instructive. There is no racial commentary, no LGBTQ presence, no environmental sermon, no critique of wealth, and no meditation on body image or neurodivergence. Jensen's acid trip and conspiracy theories serve the plot, not a diagnosis. The cast is white, the politics are missing, and the moral is that government experiments are bad, which is not a politics so much as a premise. The result is a modest, watchable genre exercise that offends no one and argues nothing. Its progressive content amounts to a woman behind the camera and another at the sound board, offered without ceremony. In 2013 that was enough to go unremarked, and unremarked is what it remains.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
In February of 1959, nine Russian hikers ventured into a remote area of the Ural Mountains. Two weeks later, all of them were found dead. What happened is a mystery that has baffled investigators and researchers for decades. It has become known as the Dyatlov Pass Incident. When five ambitious American college students are issued a grant to return to the site of the original events, they gear up with the belief that they can uncover and document the truth of what happened to the supposedly experienced hikers. But what they find is more shocking than anything they could have imagined. Retracing the steps of the Russians' ill-fated journey, the students are plagued by strange and increasingly terrifying phenomena that suggest that in spite of the desolate surroundings, they are not alone. The forces at work in the Dyatlov Pass Incident have been waiting for them.
Questions about The Dyatlov Pass Incident
Is The Dyatlov Pass Incident woke?
No — The Dyatlov Pass Incident is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Dyatlov Pass Incident have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Representation Casting at 15.
How does The Dyatlov Pass Incident compare to other 2013 movies?
It ranks #181 of the 274 films from 2013 we've scored; their average is 14. The wokest is Belle (76).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.