In Consumed (2024), Jay (Mark Famiglietti) and Beth (Courtney Halverson) are a young married couple on a hiking/camping trip. They’ve gone into the woods to celebrate Beth’s year of breast cancer remission and to inaugurate a return to their old lives. Or so they might hope. But Beth is having terrible nightmares that see her disease stalking and mutilating her. Not a great start. She also gets defensive and angry when Jay tries to help her more than her pride will allow, or maybe it’s less pride than fear. What doesn’t kill you may make you fragile. And as much as she lashes out at him, she seems particularly insecure Jay might be harboring resentment toward her for her long sickness. She might be right. “This last year was not just hard on you,” Jay tells Beth, suggesting they burn her hospital bracelet in their campfire as a ritual. So Jay has some issues of his own. He’s trying to do his best, but his best is right smack dab between Christian in Midsommar (2019) and Alex in Backcountry (2014) on the Dumb Men of Horror scale. Happily, they are not up against a bear.
Speaking of bears, comparisons to wilderness horror classic Backcountry do leap to mind in the early going of Consumed, but here it’s Beth who is unwisely determined to keep going after they find a skinned bear and to not call the rangers when they hear distant gunshots. Beth has her reasons, very emotional ones, and Jay’s motives for going along with it are no less irrational, as he tries to husband them back to a happy pre-cancer relationship, never listening enough to realize how Beth is still suffering.
You would be forgiven for expecting the movie to be an autopsy of the rift between Beth and Jay at this point, perhaps a breakup movie along the lines of Midsommar, but the plot takes an abrupt left turn when they see something in the woods, run, and Jay gets caught in a bear trap (okay, I guess he wasn’t getting out of this without some kind of bear-related suffering). This brings them across our movie’s menacing survivalist in a bear skin, Devon Sawa as Quinn, who half-harbors, half-traps them in his bunker. Quinn is gritty and taciturn and would have been played by someone like Robert Shaw a generation ago, but Sawa does a great job here. Of course Quinn’s grim disregard for others is a learned response following his own private tragedy, as he has secrets, secrets that have everything to do with Beth’s nightmares and skinned bears and whatever else is hunting them in the woods.
Once Quinn joins the party, Jay and the drama between him and his wife recedes into a dark corner, and the conflict swaps to a battle of wills between different kinds of survivors. Beth has survived her cancer, at least so far, but she is terrified of what her future holds. Meanwhile, we learn Quinn is a grieving father, and he is in the woods hunting the creature that is after Beth, a creature that seeks and thrives on disease. He’s not above using Beth as a lure, and Beth is not capable of leaving her husband behind. Big conflicts, great concept, let’s go.
Unfortunately, we don’t go much of anywhere from here. I won’t spoil it, but you’ve seen it before. And that’s the best I can say about Consumed. It’s a promising concept that feels new and different yet somehow translates into a movie exactly like so much we’ve seen before, just shouty and stabby and dark. The film has a lot going for it outside its logline, particularly the visuals of Beth’s dream sequences, strong performances from Halverson and Sawa, and as much as one is destined to make disgusted faces at Jay, I think Famiglietti did a superb job of being That Guy who thinks he’s being the best while actually being the worst. As a breast cancer survivor myself, I could nitpick some of the cancer deets, but…honestly who cares? The central conflict and central metaphor of Beth’s sickness do not need to file a treatment plan with me, and that’s not the weakness of the film anyway. The weakness of the film is its lack of imagination plus inadequate monster budget.
Perhaps the central problem with Consumed is analogous to the rift between Jay and Beth at the beginning. The concept and the visuals are calling for one thing, but the execution in dialogue and story is not answering that call. They are out of step and out of sync, like partners sleeping in different rooms. And in the end, you get a film that has simply bitten off more than it can chew.
Consumed is currently available on VOD/Digital from Vortex Media.
