The Marshes (2018)

The Marshes, directed by Roger Scott, is an Australian film about a team of ecologists who get lost in an endless Australian swamp, while some malevolent force menaces them.

Boffins Priya, Ben and student Will are conducting environmental research in a vast isolated wetland.  At first the evil seems human: Priya encounters a gnarly local at a gas station and inevitably they encounter him again in the swamp.  Ultimately, however, he is the least of their problems.

We gonna be just fine in this here swamp.

The Marshes feels like it is trying to be a mix of Wolf Creek and The Blair Witch Project, and this doesn't work too well. The first half - the Wolf Creek part - is promising, playing on the perennial Australian fear of the Bad Man in the Outback.  Nothing too original happens but it shows promise - which makes the failure to realize that potential more disappointing.

We're introduced to our main characters and the initial premise with economy.  The conflict with Zac Drayson's poacher is established efficiently - his first encounter with Priya pivoting brilliantly from easy-going banter to menace in a heartbeat.  The (for humans) bleak environment, swarming with bugs and bizarre wildlife is well realized.

At first it looks like we're going to be served some environmental horror as the ecologists (well played by Dafna Kronental, Sam Delich and Mathew Cooper) slap and scratch at mosquitos, creepy crawlies run rampant and the desolate swampscape echoes with mysterious cries and noises; then we drift into Deliverance territory (clumsily referenced in dialogue) as the poacher reappears and seems to be toying with the increasingly fearful academics.

Then another possibility opens up, as team leader Priya seems to go bananas in the bush.  She has visions and experiences that might or might not have happened.  This possibility ties in nicely with the eco-horror hints - is she hallucinating?  Is this all in her mind?  Is it really just a swamp and is the poacher just a rather unpleasant person?  Is she a butterfly in Tokyo dreaming of being a microbiologists in a swamp in Australia?

There are hints of another possibility, with surly and uncooperative Ben dropping hints he might actually be a bit of a rotter, hitching a ride of Priya's trip for dark reasons of his own.  But this avenue is not explored.  It seems he's not actually evil, just a prick.

Things change suddenly in the second half when Ben and and Will set out to collect samples Ben has unaccountably failed to collect on the other days they have been in the marshes.  They find themselves lost in a maze of swamp grass, unable to see where they are going or find a way out.  It seems like something is stalking them.  Turns out, they are right.

Here we transition disconcertingly into The Blair Witch Project territory and it is disappointing.  There's only so much time you can watch people blundering about, swearing and getting anxious, and The Blair Witch Project used up all that time.

Even the advent of the Big Bad doesn't add anything as it feels fairly random - it could have been the poacher, it could have been an angry crocodile, or it could have been a mythical swamp marauder, which is what it turns out to be.  Earlier attempts to set this up don't really do much.  He lacks menace - in spite of the actor's (Eddie Baroo) imposing presence.

Shorn of mythology or purpose, he just comes across as a slob in a swamp, with some unpleasant dietary choices.  The poacher was more terrifying, because we could grasp where he was coming from and what he wanted.

This is a nice tree, right?  Nothin' bad gonna happen here.

Stylistically Roger Scott shows some ability but lacks discernment.  His framing and mis-en-scene are good.  He indulges his artistic sensibilities with montages of non-human life in all its scaley, chitinous and feathery glory, creating a sense that our characters have ventured into somewhere people just aren't meant to be.

But he is far too dependent - particularly in the second half - aural overload, piling up the decibels in a way that alienates, rather than terrifies.

And underlying it all is a screenplay that doesn't know what it wants to be, or - having veered from one idea to another to another to another - how to properly scare its audience.  Scott might claim he made the best he could out of the script given to him, but as he is also the screenwriter he has to accept responsibilities for the lack of focus and the mis-steps in his yarn.

This film should have worked for me - I love folk horror, and the sense of menace intrinsic in isolated landscapes.  I love the idea the environment itself might actually be in some way hostile to us.  I love films about the fragility of our control over ourselves and our lives and the world around us.  I love films where all our presumptions and expectations are stripped away and we're left shivering and terrified in a bad place.  I love slasher films.  I love the intrinsic horror of being lost and trapped.  I'm all for cannibalism (as a spectator sport).

The Marshes provides all of this, but doesn't deliver on any of it.

STAR RATING: *