YellowBrickRoad - Movie Review

In the year of 1940, the entire population of Friar, New Hampshire gathered together and began walking a winding northern trail. The town was left emptied. A U.S. Army dispatch unit was sent to find them, but all they found were three-hundred dead bodies of some of the Friar’s citizens. A few of them had frozen to death while others had been mysteriously slaughtered, and except for one lone survivor the rest of the town disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.

In the year 2008, the incident at Friar had been toned down to merely stuff of backwoods legend, but the new population never dared enter the same woods, but now a team of curious enthusiasts have come together on the first official expedition of this trail in hopes of solving the mystery of what happened to the people of Friar, New Hampshire.

Once they set off into the woods their only reliability is one another, but soon it seems like the woods begin playing with their minds. The trajectories going forward are completely different when they try tracking their way back. Loud music begins playing from all directions without a single speaker or audio system in sight, filling the travelers’ ears with old rag time music and at times bludgeoning their minds with thunderous, chaotic noises.

One by one, they begin falling prey to the contagious madness that seems to not just be spread throughout the woods, but is emanating from the very air they breathe and the land they roam, and soon they begin setting their frustrations and aggressions on each other.

YellowBrickRoad is not a fake documentary like The Blair Witch Project but it could have worked as one, at least for the majority of the movie. The ensemble cast worked well enough together to where you knew they wanted to kill each other but whether they ever really like one another is another question. The directors/screenwriters Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton did a fantastic job of using the landscape to their advantage whether if it was showing tension from feeling confined despite being in such a giant vacuum of open land, or from feeling completely hopeless when all you see is just more fields to cross in every direction.

There is really only one scene that embraces the brutality of a crew members insanity, the rest of the time it is merely implied violence or light on the bloodshed which actually fits the movie really well since it is about the atmosphere of this seemingly endless venture. There are a few computer graphic moments that make you laugh rather than stun you because the technology looks completely outdated, but other than those few scenes the rest of the effects are all natural.

YellowBrickRoad is the story of madness; of how good people go insane, and whether you believe that some of them make it out alive or not, you wonder if it even matters at all given the radical state of mind they have succumbed to. At first, I wanted to fast forward to see where it was going but once I settled down and watched these people slowly lose their minds I was intrigued, and for a movie about being lost in the middle of nowhere the pacing was rather steady if only for a couple of scenes that were probably slowed down on purpose. It is a movie, I feel, that you are either going to like it or hate it; there is very little room for in between. I just so happened to like it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a majority that did not.