The life of Alex and Jenn, a young teenager couple, who in an attempt to have fun, has gone camping, as they go to the country, has been changed completely, when they arrive there and forget their cell phones, the thing that leads them to be lost and enter a region of bear that eats humans, the thing that brings terrible for them.
Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you, as the philosopher Sam Elliott said. Backcountry succeeds by not straying far from that core belief.
"Backcountry" inevitably brings on the bloody, but it finds atmospheric ways to depict how the bucolic hush of a nature getaway can morph into a survival nightmare for the unprepared.
Given that most killer bear movies are either intentionally cheesy or unwittingly inept, it's nice to see a new one that takes the concept seriously and forgoes easy splatter in favor of some strong, simple, sustained suspense.
Apparently inspired by a true story that the movie made me very much not want to look up, which I suppose may be taken by some to be a token of its effectiveness.
The film's main source of anxiety remains the lone, terrified figure, thoroughly unprepared for the savage beast who attacks, and faced at last by an uncaring natural world.
Backcountry thrives in the close-quarter details: the verbal knife-pricks of a dying relationship, the jangling impact of the smallest sounds breaking silence, that dread certainty that you're completely lost and it's getting dark.
