As you might have guessed from the title, the McCormicks love to go out into the wilderness. To remember the one year that passed since Beth’s recovery from the breast cancer during their marriage, the couple takes their kids out camping in the woods. As the couple progresses through the song, the unsettling events include the sightings of a skinned bear carcass, gunshots in the distance, slimy footprints, and the incineration of their tent. After a sudden explosion of smoke, a figure emerges, and the couple flees through the hills.
Jay’s leg gets trapped in an animal low land and is violently broken. Because her spouse is unable to run any further, Beth runs off by herself until she comes upon a clearing where the monster has collected human skins. Eventually Quinn, a perfect hunter who protects the couple and leads them back to his underworld base saves Beth and Jay. Quinn now reveals the name of the creature, which is a wendigo. It is a type of imaginary cryptid that possesses unfortunate lost wannabes hunting in the woods. He shares with them that his daughter Addison went missing in the woods five years ago and was in fact killed by this very creature. Quinn himself has been on the wendigo’s tail and will do anything to avenge him.
Quinn understands that Beth is sick as the wendigo preys on people like his dying daughter. Beth accepts the fact that she has had the same nightmare that someone is haunting her cancer ravaged body and she has also suffered cancer relapse, which she concealed from Jay to avoid aggravating their already tense relationship. Quinn thinks it’s time for him to take care of the wendigo and tells her off that she can never leave his bunker till he does. Beth tries to escape through a tunnel and it takes her to a cave where she finds many dead bodies. Beth understands that Quinn has been using other lost campers as bait in his attempts to hunt the animal.
Once Beth crawls back to Quinn’s bunker, he captures her. Quinn then says that he wants to lure the wendigo using Jay because his blood poisoning will probably kill Jay anyway. Beth offers to take her husband’s place in this situation and Quinn agrees, because Beth’s movement means more chances to entice and catch the beast.
Quinn leads Beth to an open area and forces a noose around her neck. As he listens to what sounded like his daughter, a wendigo mauls Quinn. Following the ongoing tussle, Quinn gets dangerous stabbed on his neck by Beth. Quinn sees Addison’s face on the monster and dies in confusion. The wendigo pulls Quinn off to add his skin into the rest of its skin wearing collection.
The noose breaks, and Beth is free now. But the wendigo rescues Beth bringing her back to her cave. Since she was sick and everything seemed so bleak, Beth toyed with the idea of giving up and letting the creature eat her alive. But suddenly it began to move inside her and so she hit the wendigo, cut its head off, and pierced a slug like parasite when it pursued her.
In ‘Consumed’, two conflicts seem to be intertwined. The first hurdle that the film makers ought to jump. The difficulty, however, is that by doing this, they will effectively place a second hurdle for the viewers to contend with. The problem is, at least in the case of this movie, the audience’s lukewarm engagement or investment is not conducive in helping get the necessary momentum to clear the jump. “Consumed” only has three of the principal performers in it. It’s also quite limited to a singular shot but rather, the shot being a shot of an extensive forest rather than a simplistic shot of a basic house or something basic. It also has a simple and straightforward plot, and simple to film as well.
Filmmakers on lower budgets and working on independent films with limited resources are expected to adhere to a sensible template status. Staying within their parameters is bound to avoid much of unnecessary obstacles by fragmenting the cast, keeping the shoot location small and the concept scoped in such a way that they do not require extravagant explosions, advanced computer graphic animation or other extravagant items that are beyond their ability to realistically produce.
What this, however, poses as a drawback is that interactivity leaves the viewer craving for the flesh of an extremely skeletal thriller that does not offer much substance through its bleached out bones. For any savvy movie buff that has traveled through endurance setups television shows, monotonic creature B movies, and the other cliche’s that fill the forests that ‘Consumed’ tries to plant the memory of disappointment in the ground becomes so much more.
It is very clear through their wedding rings that Jay and Beth are married. Jay could have gone on for a romantic vacation with his wife but decided to go to the woods instead which was perfect as he wanted to rekindle the love in his relationship with Beth after the first anniversary of her surviving breast cancer. His vacation would have been better and he would have avoided the struggling couple who were disturbed by the remains of a bear killed and skinned, gunshots far away, and footprints that were disturbed in the mud. But even then, things became a whole lot worse when Brook became a terrifying creature, which in some smoke appeared forcing them to run in panic, Jay and Beth.
Unsuitable for any kind of short distance running at night in a horror, chasing evening or other movie for that matter, it is rather unavoidable for someone to trip or get injured in some way with chaos. In this case, it was Jay Jay who drew this funnae raffle choice. Of course, he is the one who has taken an animal trap in it which severely tears into the spinal column. This then causes issues for his wife Beth who leaves on her own to get assistance. A scary adventure awaits her where she first stumbles across a huge pile of troll skin. And after living that horror, it finds Quinn a Tracker who might be the only one Beth has needed so much.
Quinn takes Beth and Jay back to a bunker he rather conveniently stumbled upon or constructed at some unknown time and place. As he pats them on the head, Quinn assures the two stranded campers that the creature is a wendingo, a shapeshifter and people possessor, and him, well he is an avenger. He is an avenger who has made it his life purpose to kill the creature that murdered his daughter. But, it seems Quinn’s unconventional styles of killing a cryptid seem to stem from Beth and Jay residing in a cluster of pearls hoping to discover which is worse, the rock or the hard place.
Something quite interesting, or rather boring, about all these three is that they don’t seem to be have more than one trait to their one and only character. Quinn’s fixation on revenge appears to have clouded all rational thought and emotion in him. Jay is just an illequipped provider who seems to be apathetic to the fact that his wife is quite unwell. And finally, there is Beth, who never wanted to see a single brilliant idea brought in front of the screen so how could the writers spare a single moment developing her character.
The term “Consumed” does not provide us with information about Beth other than her having cancer. We do not learn what her profession is or was. We do not get to hear about her family. She does not even talk about how all her hospital visits would have made, say, a painting, or a piano, or trying to run a marathon a very difficult thing to do which could be a passion. Setting out to tell a story starting with a sickness or a physical handicap is rather silly especially if the action is to evoke pity when there is no reason to play for sympathy in the first instance. Beth, Jay, and Quinn are formed from the very basic structure required to make a story move in the slightest metric. They obviously do not have lives outside the confines of these 90 minutes of the film and there is not much going on at all.
The supposed tension that holds Beth and Quinn stands as little more than superficial. The same applies for the relationship that exists between Beth and her spouse that is so infinitesimally small as to make one wonder how these two blands managed to stick together in the first place. Then perhaps a monster movie could survive flat human characters, as long as its creature was scary enough, but “Consumed’s” wendigo instead spends almost entire flickering clouds of smoke, denying viewers real scares that could jolt them from the stupor induced by the dry stretches of strolling, chatting and looking around the New Jersey forest area where the picture was filmed.
The reason for the existence of B movies that occur in haunted forests with a cast of four people is self evident. It makes the investors of the film happy because its revenues are bound to be recovered. It makes the job of the PR people easier who do not have to think a new strategy to sell the movie. And it makes the filmmakers happy because they get a movie which is not difficult to execute. Even harder is understanding what is it in the filmmakers, the pR, and the investors that makes them believe that the audience is looking forward to yet another some actors huffing and puffing, terrifying each other as they fight through the woods movie. I could have lived my life without having to sit through the entire motion picture ‘Consumed’. There is only one reason why such a film was ever made: there was a big point in it. It make sense to say that missing such a movie does practically never change anything in anybody’s life.
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