Wrong Turn (2021)

Wrong Turn arrives as the seventh entry in a franchise previously devoted to inbred cannibals and the dismemberment thereof, and it opens with a curious act of restraint. The cannibals are gone. In their place stands the Foundation, a settler community founded in 1859 and still nursing a grudge against the modern United States. Director Mike P. Nelson trades the meat hooks for a tribunal in the woods, which is a strange choice, and one that suggests the filmmakers wanted us to think about something. Precisely what remains elusive.

Jen leads a group of hikers off the Appalachian Trail and into the Foundation's jurisdiction, where a rolling tree trunk, a pit of stakes, and a masked court await. Her companions include her boyfriend Darius, a Black man, and the pair form an interracial couple that the film regards with perfect indifference. This is neither a failing nor a triumph. The cast is diverse in the quiet manner of a group photo, and the screenplay attaches no argument to anyone's complexion. Jen herself proves resourceful, selling her fertility and her genes to a cult of frightened patriarchs, then surviving long enough to stab her way out. That is survival, not a thesis.

The Foundation rejects modernity, fears outsiders, and executes trespassers, and the film lets all of this sit there without ever instructing us on what to make of it. A critic somewhere detected larger ideas at work. They are present, faintly, like a smell in an old house. What we are left with is a competent slasher that gestures toward meaning and then declines to commit. That is arguably the most honest thing a reboot can do.