Dan Asma’s superbly unsettling debut feature could well be California’s answer to The Blair Witch Project, as it follows a retired professor protagonist heading out into the Cuyamaca mountains and into the bowels of Mount Shasta on the trail of a lost sect. Updating and complicating the found-footage movie for the era of too-many browser tabs, it comes with an icy Lovecraftian hint of terrors beyond and packs a hefty eschatological kick.
Our intrepid academic Devin (Asma) has bitten off more than he can chew, judging by the riverbed of bloodshot veins disfiguring his face and failing mental faculties that have left him unable to drive his car out of the wilderness. Still able to access his past recordings, he jogs his own memories about what led him out there in the first place: ex-wife Kate (Nicole Jones) dropping off old camcorder excerpts of college hangouts with pal Charlie (Keaton Asma), who recently killed himself. An orphaned member of the mysterious Church of Heaven’s Light cult, as a child Charlie was found staggering out of the Cuyamacas alone – but brought with him a wild cosmic pontification or two about superior beings stalking mankind.
As head of the Buddha Jones marketing agency, who cut sharp trailers for Mother! and Hereditary among others, Asma knows his way around an edit, and so he generates a sharp narrative line and nagging suspense from Devin’s nested jumble of vlogs. Venturing out solo, Devin’s field research centres on an anomalous shipping container sat among the Cuyamaca’s euclidean boulders; the mathematical and anthropological colleagues he consults with strew equally intriguing exposition and conjecture all around. If this bombardment of footage, Zoom calls and Facetime wasn’t enough, Devin’s documentary stash, when viewed, appears shot through with freaky alien transmissions.
So overwhelming is the rush down an archival multimedia rabbithole that Asma rather loses the the opportunity to use Blair Witch-style pacing to accentuate the dread. And only belatedly picking up on Charlie as the story’s lost boy, the final interdimensional round of exposition and revelation is a shade too blatant. But Asma bakes in a palpable sense of disintegration and malignancy into the very fabric of the film; our technological compulsion to constantly record, seek meaning and rewind back towards our origins feels like the real corrupting force here.
• Tribe is available on digital platforms from 25 May.
