My quick rating – 4.2/10. The Wild wants you to believe you’re signing up for a cabin-in-the-woods horror flick — missing friend, mysterious campsite, random woodsman named Zeke — but what you actually get is ninety minutes of unresolved friendship drama masquerading as genre cinema.
The film opens with the tragic loss of Bea, the fourth member of a longtime friend group now reduced to Emilia (Sunita Mani), Finn (Kate Easton), and Lucey (Kayla Foster). Emilia insists they revive their annual camping trip, supposedly to heal old wounds. We get quick personality snapshots of each woman, enough to understand their dynamic, or more accurately, why they shouldn’t be within five miles of each other.
Credit where it’s due: these characters at least look like they’ve been camping before. They pack properly, pitch tents without screaming, and don’t treat nature like an alien planet. But emotional competence? Nowhere to be found. Within minutes of setting up camp, the passive-aggressive sniping begins, which begs the question — why did they even come on this trip? Shared grief? Tradition? A group suicide pact via bad vibes?
Enter Zeke (Danny Deferrari), a wildly average-looking man who becomes the immediate fixation of all three women faster than mosquitoes to exposed ankles. They meet him in the woods, invite him for a drink (because inviting strangers into your isolated campsite always goes well), pull out the drugs, and — shocker — everything spirals.
At this point, horror fans will be waiting for the real movie to begin. It never does.
Despite being marketed as a horror film, The Wild is really a messy therapy session with pine trees. Instead of slashing, stalking, or supernatural shenanigans, we get monologues about betrayal, jealousy, and unspoken resentments. The closest thing to terror is secondhand embarrassment.
The pacing drags like a rolled ankle on a hiking trail, and the so-called twist lands with a wet thud. Plot holes are sprinkled throughout like trail markers — easy to spot, impossible to ignore. The performances are serviceable, fitting for the modest budget, but no one elevates the material beyond “competent streaming filler.”
There is a compelling idea buried somewhere in here — grief fracturing friendships, nostalgia masking toxicity — but instead of exploring that through tension and fear, the film just…argues in the woods for an hour and a half. At least director Jessica Kozak gave us an end to work with. It may not have floored me, but at least it gave the monotony of the rest a bit of closure.
If you’re expecting horror, skip it. If you enjoy watching people who supposedly love each other slowly realize they don’t — well, you’ll still probably get bored before the credits.
