Who seriously green-lighted this movie? It’s extremely difficult to come up with any one good thing that this movie did. After having sat in my library queue for about a year or so, I decided it was finally time to knock this one out.

Right off the bat, you just had a feeling that this was going to be a trauma fest. Yet another woman in an abusive relationship but can’t say no when the man keeps coming back. Sounds insensitive of me? Sure. But maybe I wouldn’t have been if the movie offered something more in terms of character development. OK, so a group of female friends and strangers with deep emotional trauma issues decide to go on a hiking journey in some remote area along with a doctor/therapist. Our main protagonist, Joy, and another hiker start to experience some weird sensations and feelings along the journey. After a whole lot of nothing, we discover they are stalked by some orc-looking monster straight out of Lord of the Rings. As you can guess, our female lead must now do battle with said monster by “conquering” her fears and psychological trauma experienced at the hands of her abusive boyfriend to get out of the forest alive.

I mean, sure? The biggest issue is that the setup to pretty much everything in the movie is either done extremely poorly or non-existent at all. Seriously, where the hell did this monstrosity of a man/monster/beast come from? The only hint I remember is when the doctor said something about the land they were walking on being used thousands of years ago and something about healing rituals being performed along with sacrifices. That’s it. So is dude related to that? It definitely isn’t a figment of their imagination. It’s not that hard to see that they were drawing inspirations from The Descent with that whole creepy monster in a cave thing. Dark Nature is really just a bad movie with nothing to remember once the credits roll. If you want to watch a movie about abusive relationships, there are likely so many better ones. And what is up with that crap ending?