THE BANISHED (2024)

3 stars

Blue Finch Film Releasing. Digital 28th July

Original title: Baal

A huge forest. A panicked woman (we soon learn is Grace) has been camping there – someone, who was with her, is missing from their tent. This will make sense later…

Grace Jennings (Meg Eloise-Clarke) is trying to reach her brother David (Gautier de Fontaine) by phone but it keeps going to voicemail. She leaves the city to go home to a small, remote, somewhat rundown community, as their father has recently died. She hasn’t visited the family home for a long time and she finds it a shell of what it was like when she was a child.

Odd things start to happen – in a cupboard she finds a knife with a strange markings on it. A noise – she runs outside, but sees nothing. 

The film keeps cutting back to her in the forest. Leaving her tent behind she starts walking through the trees – except she gets lost and ends up back where she started so she calls for help on a crackly radio. A man answers who claims to also be lost.

As she continues to try and find her brother she sees a wall at the grocery store with lots of posters showing missing persons including her aunt. In her Dad’s possessions she finds images of fallen angels. Visiting a warehouse, where she is told she may find her sibling, she sees people being taken away in a van – inside the building a drugged up woman tells her they have gone to the forest and they don’t come back. 

The two narrative threads start to come together when she visits Mr Green (Leighton Cardno), one of her former teachers, who, after demanding a chunk of money, says he’ll take her to the remote commune in the forest to find David.

What is she getting herself into? Where has her companion in the forest disappeared to? Who is the stranger on the crackling radio?

Director and writer Joseph Sims-Dennett has created a slow burn mystery built on atmosphere. He also uses subliminal images and flash cuts. There are links to past history and Grace’s family, which are hinted at but aren’t fully explored or revealed. Lead actress Meg Eloise-Clarke is very good and pretty much carries the film. Well shot by Sam Powyer, with good use of the location in the Blue Mountains in the state of New South Wales, and cleverly edited by Andrew Bennett, Leighton Cardno and the director, even if initially things are confusing. The film goes hippie folk horror in the last half hour and leads to a disappointing and enigmatic ending. 

Steve Kirkham