The Trail

The Trail sees Sam (Whitefield) come to pick up her brother, Martin (Urquhart) to take him for a day out hiking in the woods. Martin lives in sheltered accommodation and already seems lost just standing on the pavement waiting for his sister. He is jumpy and anxious and every sound on the street makes his head turn like a spooked owl. Once inside the car, Martin manages to relax a little, and the cigarettes his sister got him settle his nerves even more, as they set out from the hustle and bustle of the big city.

However, no sooner have the siblings rocked up, parked the car and put their jackets on, than an outgoing, over-friendly chap in a red parka (Pope) comes along shouting at them from down the trail about the parking regulations. This encounter really sets Martin on edge again and he can’t help staring out between the trees imagining to himself just what horrors might lay out there.

Soon enough though, Sam gets Martin out onto the trail so that they can have a nice time in nature and talk about some of the important things, like the possibility of Martin moving in. But out in the wilds, the creepiness quickly settles back in, Martin starts to see danger everywhere, and the guy in red pops back up in the middle of the forest to start shouting at them again. Cue, a brief chase through the woods and an extended game of hide-and-seek, in which Martin and Sam feel they must get back to their car immediately and escape the madman on the prowl.

For what is, on the surface, a regular ‘escape the woods’ thriller, The Trail tries to dig a little deeper into its own psychology. Kieran Urquhart and Suzy Whitefield both do a good job of playing things nice and easy, calm and natural, but then appearing off-kilter at select moments to keep the viewer on edge. The direction from Joseph Ollman, who produced and wrote the short alongside Whitefield, also manages to keep us guessing on just how severe the threat is, whilst throwing in some nice imagery suitable to the location and genre. The Trail is genuinely unsettling at times, with the fear coming more from Martin’s perception of things than it is from anything that’s happening on screen, and that is all to the filmmakers’ credit.

The main antagonist though, is a guy in a red jacket who likes to stand between the trees and shout, ‘Hey!’ from a distance. It seems that he is purposefully enigmatic and vague and therefore doesn’t help in keeping the scenario grounded. The suspension of disbelief needed for watching The Trail is never really found by Ollman, with the characters being too flat and the scenario too simple. It’s hard to say whether The Trail is supposed to be scary, or thoughtful, or both, but it manages each in some measure and at least opens a mental health conversation about the very real fears of those in care.