YellowBrickRoad

YellowBrickRoad is certainly a very interesting movie.  I won't say that it's scary because it isn't, but it does have an incredibly creepy atmosphere.  Interesting color and camera work make it stand out visually even though it doesn't have a lot of CGI flare like a Zack Snyder movie, but the colors take what could be potentially boring scenery a elevate it to a very surreal state that works incredibly well with the films premise.

In YellowBrickRoad a group of journalists are investigating a mysterious nature trail in a backwoods town where 70 years previously the whole population of the town just walked along the trail and disappeared leaving only a few dozen mangled bodies and one lone survivor.  The main characters have packed food and hiking gear as well as positioning and mapping equipment. As the team get deeper into the trail they realize that something is out of the ordinary and the collective sanity of the group starts to break down.

YellowBrickRoad is a very character driven film as we, the audience, watch the sanity of characters slowly deteriorate and become enthralled by the mystery of the trail.  The movie has some very interesting ideas and makes excellent use of sound, and particularly gore.  The gore in YellowBrickRoad is very sparse and very well used to create its' atmosphere.  One scene in particular involving a scarecrow reference to "The Wizard of Oz" is very unnerving.  YellowBrickRoad is very aware that it is a movie and never tries to go for the hyper-realism that many other movies strive for, instead it uses the audiences inference that everything going on is real and slowly leads them down the rabbit hole with the characters.

I won't say that YellowBrickRoad is a perfect movie, it has some pacing issues and I do believe there were a few too many characters, but overall it is a very interesting journey into a world of insanity and the supernatural.

8.5/10