Jonas Govaerts‘s Cub (or Welp) might just be the nastiest backwoods slasher to come creeping out of Belgium since The Ordeal by Fabrice Du Welz traumatized moviegoers in 2004. In Govaert’s 2014 directorial debut, a bunch of unlucky cub scouts discover themselves within the crosshairs of a demented father/son duo with a proclivity for corpse hoarding and looking people within the French countryside. Viewers anticipating a slasher flick in an analogous vein to Friday the thirteenth have to look elsewhere. Govaerts’s Cub is a brutally unique film with a transparent identification. Yes, there are a ton of little nods to Sleepaway Camp, The Final Terror, and Just Before Dawn scattered all through, however Cub’s path and writing are a lower above these movies. The director by no means resorts to the techniques we’ve come to anticipate from these slashers. The very first thing that marks a big departure is that he populates his film virtually solely with a forged made up of spectacular baby actors. He forgoes the elements viewers usually denote with backwoods, teen-centric horror movies – Cub is something however a morality play and deftly avoids the principles characters in comparable properties dwell and die by. You have been warned.
Sam (Maurice Luijten) is a 12-year-old cub scout with an overactive creativeness and is a magnet for hassle. Peter (Stef Aerts) and Kris (Titus De Voodgt) are the camp leaders who inform the scouts a narrative: Mysterious occasions are happening within the space the place they plan on tenting. Local villagers are attributing it to a creature of folklore generally known as Kai, who adjustments right into a werewolf at evening. The children largely appear unfazed by the rumour of strangers and these alleged supernatural occasions. The aerial photographs comply with the van because it drives down a serpentine highway by means of the woods, subtly channeling Deliverance. Sam is routinely mocked by the opposite scouts, overwhelmed up, disadvantaged of meals, known as a liar, and even chased by a canine. Their habits isolates Sam and a feral boy within the woods begins to observe him, sneaking into his tent whereas he sleeps, watching him dig the camp shit-pit and camouflaging himself in a visually spectacular treehouse. Sam isn’t the one one beneath statement. Their presence on the campsite has triggered an underground alarm system and the person monitoring it has caught the scent of cub blood. Sam lastly meets the mysterious Kai (Gill Eeckelaert), a boy who has regressed to a feral state, and Sam flees. Kai’s concept of bonding with Sam includes a doggy loss of life, which lands Sam in much more hassle along with his camp chief. Kai isn’t the one feral individual within the woods although – and after they appeal to the eye of the poacher (Jan Hammenecker), it raises the chance that no person will make it out of the woods alive.
Govaerts took a giant gamble making children the protagonists in Cub and the danger paid off. Govaerts makes use of horror as a tool to discover a Lord of the Flies-like dynamic between Sam and Kai and look at bullying and the way shortly we will devolve into an animalistic state if pushed to the margins. The pure dialogue and performing of the kid actors make the film a genuinely terrifying watch. The boys discuss and behave precisely the way you’d anticipate them to on this situation. It impacts us when a personality can die at any second and we spend almost an hour with these children earlier than the looking/killing even begins. Horror is all the time simpler after we develop to love the folks on-screen proper earlier than they find yourself on the receiving finish of a nasty entice.
The inclusion of youngsters in a bleak narrative isn’t the one purpose it stands out from different woods-based slasher motion pictures. As beforehand talked about, Cub shares a tone and sure nihilistic prospers with The Ordeal. The location is completely important to the film’s grim trajectory, however total, it by no means borrows from different cinematic (primarily American) sources to induce shock or worry within the viewer. Govaerts’s grim tone stays constant all through with a continuing permeating dread from the outset and he makes nice use of his desolate and rural setting. Another major distinction in tackling a woods-based horror was getting across the staples he couldn’t fall again on. His response to this was to attempt one thing new with Cub. With children concerned, the director wanted to desert most of the tropes inherent inside this subgenre: intercourse and the ever present archetypal figures. As a end result, Cub advantages from not being a generic slasher by emphasizing how the director determined to put in writing and shoot his film in a approach that feels European and visually distinct.
The Belgian-based filmmaker lower his enamel on twisted diversifications of brief tales by the likes of Laura Hird and Richard Matheson. To be clear: Cub is a comparatively lean story with a runtime of lower than 90 minutes. Like his brief motion pictures, he retains his debut function brief and sharp with little filler or aspect characters and with no extraneous plot factors to pad out the story. Cub has a rigorously deliberate construction and a sluggish burn with ample set-up, and character growth, and, consequently, it hits all of the beats of a terrific horror film. He makes use of tropes sparingly and in a much less apparent approach — Friday the thirteenth it isn’t — and injects a realism and sense of enjoyable into the story earlier than delivering a daunting movie. His artwork path, masks design, and underground lair present ingenuity and a nightmarish visible aptitude, awe-inspiring in its simplicity. They are good of their building and as well-thought-out because the plot, tone, and characters. As beforehand talked about, Cub has in-jokes and nods to different well-known backwood horror motion pictures which display Govaert’s intimate data of and affection for horror cinema. But Cub brings as a lot to the desk — if no more — because the classics previous it.
Cub is accessible to stream within the U.S. on Tubi.
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