Synopsis: Two decades after her brother mysteriously disappeared on Vancouver Island, a documentary filmmaker sets out to solve his missing person’s case. When a disturbing piece of evidence is revealed, she comes to believe he might still be alive.
Stars: Miranda MacDougall, Markian Tarasiuk, Ryan Alexander McDonald, Christine Willes
Director: Markian Tarasiuk
Rated: R
Running Length: 89 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Markian Tarasiuk’s debut feature is an uneven Vancouver Island mystery-horror that takes too long to find its feet but earns its keep with a genuinely rattling final sequence. Miranda MacDougall is the reason to stay.
Hunting Matthew Nichols Review: Found Footage, Lost Footing
We’re twenty-six years on from The Blair Witch Project, and the found-footage movement that strange little indie set loose on horror cinema has become one of the most imitated playbooks in the genre. Most of the imitators are bad. A handful are great. And then there’s the interesting middle — films that understand what made Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s DIY spook-show land but can’t quite replicate the trick. Hunting Matthew Nichols, the feature directorial debut of Canadian actor Markian Tarasiuk, lives squarely in that middle. It has real ambition, a strong closing sequence, and a genre-mashup instinct you have to admire even when the execution falters.
A Mockumentary With a Straight Face
Twenty-two years ago, two teenage boys on Vancouver Island — Matthew Nichols and his best friend Jordan Reimer — walked into the forest on Halloween night, 2001, and never walked out. Police eventually found their camcorder in a remote cabin, but no bodies, no blood, no real answers.
In the present, Matthew’s sister Tara (Miranda MacDougall) returns to the island to make a documentary about the disappearance, bringing along director Markian Tarasiuk (There’s Someone Inside Your House, playing a version of himself) and cameraman Ryan Alexander McDonald (also playing himself). They interview retired investigator Pam Hamilton (Christine Willes), the boys’ families, a former mayor, and a local anthropologist who knows the island’s stranger folklore.
The film wears multiple costumes — true-crime doc, mockumentary, found footage, meta fourth-wall breaker — and the fun of the opening third is not being sure which one will win. Tarasiuk commits to the bit with such a straight face that one shiny tracksuit or one raised eyebrow on a local townsperson would push the whole thing into Waiting for Guffman territory. Instead, the movie holds its poker face for as long as it possibly can — and that commitment is both the reason the opening works and the reason the middle stalls.
The Cast Reaches a Ceiling
MacDougall is the right casting for Tara. She throws herself into the unraveling with real intensity, and when the script asks her to pitch into near-hysteria, she doesn’t flinch. Willes, a working Canadian actor for four decades, gives Pam just enough guarded warmth to feel like someone who’s been protecting information for twenty years. The friction between MacDougall’s escalating desperation and Willes’s measured restraint is where the film’s human drama actually lives.
Tarasiuk-as-Tarasiuk is a trickier proposition. He’s the most aware person in every frame he’s in, and you can feel him directing from inside the shot. Whether that’s a deliberate performance choice or the reality of a first-time director trying to act and call the takes at the same time, it creates a strange friction in the mockumentary fabric. McDonald mostly recedes behind his camera, which is probably the right call.
The Middle Third Slows to a Drip
Here’s the central problem: the film spends most of its first hour setting a table the audience has already guessed the menu for. Interviews accumulate. Creaky local gossip about Satanic rituals circulates. A former commune on the island gets mentioned. An anthropologist waves the talk away as folklore designed to keep kids out of the woods, and you can almost hear the gears of the third act clicking into place. When Tarasiuk asks supporting players to reach for a level of intensity their performances can’t quite sustain, the dialogue starts reading like deadpan dribble rather than drama.
And then the last fifteen minutes arrive, and the film remembers what it wanted to be.
A Finale That Earns Its Keep
The payoff sequence is genuinely unsettling. Tarasiuk and cinematographer Justin Sebastian have been saving their best material for the forest, and when the characters finally step into it, the shift in tension is real. A black-and-white animated interlude earlier in the film — detailing a local legend about a nineteenth-century cannibal named Roy McKenzie — is a striking creative swing that hints at the visual imagination Tarasiuk has been rationing. Composers Jeff Griffiths and Christopher King underscore the dread without oversteering. Editor Jonathan Mathew tightens everything down for the finale and earns a real jolt.
Credit to production designer Doug Teather and set decorator Matthew Brunt for rendering Vancouver Island as a gray, waterlogged character in its own right, and to costume designer Nikola Stojisavljevic for dressing the leads in gear that looks actually wearable in a forest at night. It’s the kind of detail that separates a low-budget genre film from a cheap one.
First Feature / Honest Debut
When Hunting Matthew Nichols turned up as the Mystery Movie / Scream Unseen at regional chains a few weeks back, some audiences reportedly walked out calling it one of the worst surprises they’d ever been subjected to. That’s too harsh. There are real bones here, and a dandy scare at the end.
What the film needed was either a more textured script or a slightly deeper ensemble to carry the middle. MacDougall and Tarasiuk are both worth following past this one. A first feature this uneven can still be an honest debut — and an honest debut is worth more than a polished imitation.
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