Beyond the Drumlins (2025)

Beyond the Drumlins virtual screening at Panic Fest, 29 March 2025 

Lost in the woods, a panicking man (Bradford Selby) runs, as we see – but he does not – a figure standing and watching from the tree line. This opening sequence from Dan Bowhers’ Beyond the Drumlins could come from any common-or-garden backwoods slasher, except that there are details here that suggest something altogether less rational going on: the whispering voices all around (“such a beautiful place to die,” one clearly says); the lost man stopping to vomit an abundance of dry earth; a weird fractal shape appearing in an arboreal trunk; or the man finally, just when he reaches the edge of a clearing and appears to have made his escape, hearing a voice say “Welcome home” as he himself vanishes into thin air. Whatever the hell is happening in this prologue is a mystery, defying ready explanation. 

Hoping to scout a site where he can do fieldwork with his students the following semester, and maybe even make the odd publishable find, archaeologist Professor Jonathan Rust (played by Bowhers’ co-writer Michael Kowalski) is persuaded by his friend the geologist Tanner Richards (Dan Titmuss) to check out some “unexploited old growth forest”, a 10 kilometre hike “just beyond the Drumlins, at the end of Rolling Acres Farm” in a remote part of Upstate New York. So they head out there, accompanied by geographer Professor Mary Boyd (Morgan De Togne) and Jonathan’s ‘anthropology major’ TA Cameron Burson (Emma Jessop), and with the older general contractor Tom Cundley (Goodfella Mike G) as their ‘shovel man’. The farmer (Ed Contini) who owns the land does not quite give them an Old Man’s Warning™, but ominously eyes the van in which they came as though it were practically his already. This, and the prologue, suggest that their doom may already be sealed.

From the start, the expedition yields results. Basic digs disinter layers of detritus – a worthless bottle top, but also an older ox shoe, a chisel and a very old metal cruciform object – while Tanner’s ‘ground penetrating radar’ (which he normally uses when engaged in reconnaissance for fracking companies) reveals large, odd voids under the ground. As Tanner, who used to be a talking head on Alternative Sciences, discusses the world as a “fantastic place” where “anything is possible… parallel dimensions, aliens, God, gods”, these five campers will find themselves being confronted by phenomena that utterly confound their comprehension: sourceless voices, ghost-like figures, strange disappearances, a humming, moss-covered stone of unknown material and unparalleled properties which echoes the enigmatic monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and a general slippage of their grip on reality. 

A drumlin is a streamlined, elongated, ovoid mound formed by glacial drift – but perhaps the more important word in the title of Beyond the Drumlins is in fact its first. For this is a film of transgressive experiences, where scientists find themselves outside of their comfort zones, forced to bump up against the limits of knowledge. Like in Philip Gelatt’s They Remain (2018), Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (2021), Justin Janowitz’s Do Not Watch (2023) and Teresa Sutherland’s Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023), this virgin forestland conceals an ancient, eternal force that might all at once be natural defence, extra-terrestrial intrusion, divine intervention, cosmic joke, afterlife portal or collective, toxic hallucination (there are repeated cutaways to mushrooms). 

“The world”, as Mary says, “is an old place, we’ll never understand everything.” Here even science comes with outer edges, and, as our five expeditioners retrace labyrinthine circles in pursuit of phantom ideas, their confusion is replicated in a film that offers up endless ambiguities without resolution. The monolith has a dark hole in its centre which might as well serve as the film’s central metaphor – a gaping void in place of meaning which viewers can supplement only with parts of themselves. Meanwhile the film’s other metaphor – an arrow head which Jonathan intends to plant in the new dig site to mess with his students’ understanding – demonstrates how unreliable and easily manipulated our perceptions can be on our journey home to the great beyond, where everything left behind ends up garbage. 

Deftly written and full of lived-in performances, Beyond the Drumlins is an uncanny sylvan mystery that shows experts in the past, in humanity, in maps and in rock formations all, when faced with the unknown and their own mortality, becoming equally lost in the woods. Here, after all, the only certainty is that we come of earth, and must eventually go back to it – and everything else is just campfire stories that we tell each other to while away our time, to entertain and awe, and momentarily, vainly to contain the void.

strap: Dan Bowhers’ horror mystery forces academic expeditioners to face their nature and lose themselves in a virgin forest

© Anton Bitel