Rent Consumption (2016)

Eerie, low budget tale - spoilers follow. - Consumption review by NP

Four ‘young friends’ travel to the snowy Utah mountains so they can be alone to argue, make up and argue a little more. As things go, this low-budget horror is something of a roller-coaster. Normal conversations are punctuated with sudden moments of sullen anger, which immediately disappear, allowing the conversations to continue as normal. The outbursts, and reactions to them, come and go and then vanish. Such disjointedness is either an inconsistent script, or director/writer Brandon Scullion trying to persuade us that, out in these freezing wastes, evil lurks.

So these kids: Mallory (Arielle Brachfeld, probably the best performance here) self-harms, Eric (Chris Dorman) is an alcoholic, Becca (Sarah Greyson) might be pregnant and the other? Seth (David Lautman) has secretly come all this way to bury to dismembered body-parts of his mother. That he returns to the cabin to find his mother (Maria Olsen) alive and well and waiting for him is a good scare.

This eerie tale is cursed by some typical low-budget trappings – often stilted acting and sound issues resulting in dialogue being drowned out. The locations are excellent however, the snow adding an extra degree of isolation so important in conveying the levels of danger the characters find themselves trapped in.