The Dyatlov Pass Incident [AKA Devil's Pass] (2013)

I feel bad for Renny Harlin: has any other relatively mainstream director ever been so consistently middle-of-the-road throughout a thirty-odd-year filmmaking career? Boasting five Razzie nominations for Worst Director, and of course, the Guinness-certified Biggest Box Office Flop of All Time (Cutthroat Island), Harlin has done well just to keep working in this business. But the saddest part is that he obviously has real talent: almost all of his pictures have some strong elements, and often, they seem like great movies from a distance. But they are always plagued with silly little problems that bring the main product down. Consider Deep Blue Sea: even on its release it was the go-to shark movie after Jaws, and it has maintained a strong cult following, at least among my own generation. But despite the movie’s many strengths, it is difficult to forget the critical reception, or to forget what we all knew: it was a silly, silly film, with many logical inconsistencies. This, sadly, is a pattern that seems to stalk Harlin throughout his career. 

With the Dyatlov Pass Incident (A.K.A. Devil’s Pass), Harlin had rather unique opportunity to really have fun. For anybody not familiar with the events of 1959 in the Ural Mountains, a group of nine students – all experienced hikers and mountaineers – set out on a trek and never came back. A short time later, rescue teams found all nine dead, under mysterious circumstances. Some were partially undressed, some had massive internal injuries without any outer trace of struggle, and examination of their tent found it had been cut open from the inside and fled from in the middle of the night. No official explanation has ever been offered, in spite of rampant speculation and conspiracy theory – ranging from yeti and UFO to military experiment and infrasound – making this incident an absolute dream to turn into a film, which nobody has ever done. And Harlin, in his classic style, starts off well and ends well, but loses his footing somewhere in between.

It’s a found footage movie, which is just as laborious a filmmaking technique as any other nowadays. In fact it is the Dolly Parton of filmmaking: you have no idea how expensive it is to look this cheap! Behind the scenes featurettes show Harlin crawling around in the snow looking for the most appropriate camera angles, crossing off requirements and scenes from the storyboards – FF is a surprisingly technical process. Unfortunately for the most part, this movie underutilises the format, which in the second act seems to simply serves as a means to masking breaks in continuity. A good FF will take advantage of the moods and emotions you can create by adopting a handheld POV (The Blair Witch Project), but almost nothing here is done with this extra dimension. At least until the end.

So how would Dyatlov Pass and FF go together? Ding-ding-ding ‘College documentary project’! Holly (Holly Goss) reckons she’s 21 when she’s at least a decade past that, and has had Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters-style premonitions of the Ural Mountains all her life. She has apparently been given a project grant by the University of ARE-gan where she is a student (she and almost all the actors are British and acting American, and Goss’ accent is slippery at best). So she takes a few friends to Russia and off they hike. Either Holly is very disoriented with her facts, or the writers made the least effort possible to change key information, as she recounts the Dyatlov Pass events inaccurately, attributing one victim's injuries to another and so forth. 

The group's overnight stay at the site where the Dyatlov group's bodies were found kicks off the horror but doesn't keep it going. Explosions set off an avalanche that kills one and breaks the legs of another of Holly's friends, but not only are they now fighting for survival with no equipment in some seriously harsh conditions, they are also subject to what lies behind the mysterious door Holly found in the side of the mountain. Here Harlin goes and stamps his trademark silliness all over what was shaping up to be a respectable picture. And it's not even the time travel twist that bothers me: it's a good twist, as limited as my comprehension of time paradoxes is. What bothers me is the introduction of lurking humanoid creatures. As I told about in my review of the sequel Blair Witch, as a modern horror viewer I am sick to death of lanky, pale, glowing-eyed, quadroped humanoid creatures. From I Am Legend and The Descent to basically every creature movie of this decade, it has been done a thousand times, and never very distinctively. Come up with a new monster, or do a different kind of horror.

It happens that these monsters are relative to the time travel theme, but even then, they are badly done with CGI and suddenly bring the entire quality of the movie down. I actually sighed and rolled my eyes, it was so poor. This idiotic Resident Evil-style sequence takes place, and it's nowhere near as terrifying as, say, the chase by the hooded and armed assailants who originally chased them was. The entire movie could have done much better were it not for the creature feature.

People on discussion boards have presented an interesting array of ideas and interpretations that the time travel theme has prompted, as well as on how sloppily it is executed. The second act of the movie takes on that annoying horror habit of telling rather than showing. So the remaining characters talk the audience through their patchy theory on what is going on and what they should do next. For example, tell me what's wrong with this suggestion: they theorise that the wormhole they have discovered will take them anywhere that they think of hard enough, so they should think of the place that's freshest in their minds that they recall vividly, for the best chances of success; they decide on outside of the door, on the side of the mountain. Answer: well, everything. Let's assume their theory that the wormhole can take them anywhere is somehow correct. How do we know all you have to do is picture your destination to get there? Secondly, if they are going for a place that they can recall vividly, how about home, thousands of miles away from this hellish situation? How about anywhere but back out into the Russian wilderness with still no supplies or equipment? What exactly is the plan once they get back out onto the side of the mountain, where they managed to lock out the two hooded assailants earlier? 

Just this face... for 90 long minutes

Renny Harlin seems to suffer from over-confidence. His behind-the-scenes dialogue always boasts of things we don't see as an audience: how frightening that scene was, how fantastically talented the actors were. Here he was determined to hire unknowns (that's fine, lots of horrors like to do that), but he also reckons that they were the cream of the crop. Performances are mediocre at best, but the prize here goes to Holly Goss for being terrible. She never ever seems scared when she finds herself in terrifying situations, and has this gormless look on her face throughout. Plus, as early implied, her accent is not great. 

You know what this movie should have been? An account of the real Dyatlov group and their doomed expedition, without the found footage format. Just a straight up narrative of what we know happened, and then perhaps a fictionalised account of what could have caused the group to flee their tent and eventually die. Because the appeal of the Dyatlov Pass incident is that it is a real life event that still doesn't make much sense, and feels like one of those unsolvable mysteries. There you have your perfect movie! You don't need to modernise it and make it about American college students for it to be interesting.