My quick rating – 4.5/10. Here is what would happen if four grown men went on a “bonding” fishing trip and immediately remembered they don’t actually like one another. Refuge demonstrates it with 87 minutes of yelling, pleading, and one increasingly desperate dad holding a gun like it’s the only thing keeping his sanity taped together. The film kicks off with a frantic 70s–80s thriller energy. A father calling the police about his missing daughter, voice shaking, tension already thick enough to filet. It’s a good start, and for a moment, I thought we might actually get a calm buildup before the blowup. Spoiler: absolutely not.
We meet Sam, played by Adam Sinclair, arriving first at the cabin to prep for what he claims is a fishing trip, but is very obviously an interrogation/emotional demolition derby. He’s got a gun, an attitude, and zero interest in discussing bait. When Jay (Christopher Dietrick), Mike (Adam Dorsey), and Barry (Donald Paul) show up, it becomes instantly clear why these four fell out of touch. They don’t act like old friends reconnecting. They act like coworkers forced into a weekend retreat after an HR complaint. Refuge doesn’t even pretend they enjoy each other. They walk in mid-argument and somehow never stop.
Once Sam flips the script and accuses one of them of being involved in his daughter’s disappearance, the cabin transforms into a pressure cooker of constant shouting and desperate self-defense. I’ll be honest – after about twenty minutes of these guys whining, screaming, and contradicting each other, I started to understand why Sam brought the gun. If I were stuck in a cabin with this group, someone would’ve been tossed into the lake long before accusations started flying.
The acting, thankfully, saves Refuge from collapsing into pure noise. Every performance feels fairly believable, which helps maintain the mystery even when the pacing stretches scenes like taffy to hit that feature-length runtime. And with the entire film taking place inside the same cabin, there isn’t much visual flair to lean on, so the cast really does most of the heavy lifting. It also taps into that dad-brain fear. “How far would you go for your kid?” Apparently, the answer here is “invite your annoying friends to the woods and scream at them for hours.”
What baffled me was the ending, specifically the crew walking away from the cabin as if both trucks didn’t mysteriously vanish during all the chaos. Did the bickering disable the engines? Did the cabin eat them? Someone forgot the keys and just decided hiking was easier? Refuge won’t win awards for plot density, but as a low-budget, well-intentioned thriller, it works. It’s simple, tense, and at times, ridiculous. Still enjoyable enough for what it is, even if I was constantly thinking, “Yeah…I’d have killed these three guys just for my own sanity.”
