Loon Lake is a 2019 thriller about a man who travels to the countryside in search of peace, only to find a haunting nightmare from which he cannot escape.
Louis Olsen (Nathan Wilson) arrives in a small Minnesota town, beset by grief at the loss of his wife, he now looking to find some solace on quaint old farmland surrounded by fish-stocked lakes. One of them is Loon Lake, a popular fishing spot where he heads to first, the isolation at first appealing, though he stumbles upon a few out of the way headstones in the shade of a tall tree and while snapping a few pictures, walks over the grave of Mary Jane Terlinden (Kelly Erin Decker). Turns out, she’s a witch from 1880, who got her head chopped off by a fanatic priest, she supposedly landing a curse on the town before she passed. Louis is about to find out if that’s true, but is it real or is the nightmare slowly consuming him only in his head?
Directed by Ansel Faraj, who co-wrote the screenplay with Wilson, Loon Lake is a modest little film shot with a small budget and cast, telling a familiar story of a returning ghost from dangerous pasts, this one adapted from a genuine Minnesota folk legend. We jump from the past to the future in seeing the fate of Mary Jane and her reach beyond the hollows of her resting place, where hazy toned flashbacks follow the brutal decapitation of the accused witch and her promise that for anyone who treads three times on her grave shall suffer her wrath. Back in the present, the folks Louis meets in town tell of some who have done so and then met with troubling ends.
The first thing refreshing about Look Lake is in fact these townsfolk, who Faraj and Wilson wisely keep well-grounded, avoiding the usual clichés of people desperate to keep a deadly secret from an outsider, instead playfully entrusting the legend among themselves with tongue in cheek like most would. That helps a lot in questioning the strange events that soon befall Louis. Furthermore, the flashbacks themselves offer meaty backstory to Mary Jane as well, the temptations her beauty produce and her link with nature securing an easy accusation.
Thankfully devoid of the usual cacophony of easy jumpscares and bombastic sound effects, Faraj mostly depends on moody visuals in generating some frights. These include a few genre standbys of course, such as shadowy figures in windows and things hiding in the darkness under the bed. They’re obvious but effective, building to a more twisty finale that is meant to have us guessing as to what is actually happening in the few days (marked by title cards flashing on screen) Louis spends up at the lake.
To be fair, Faraj isn’t working with a lot, the limitations keeping some of the film’s reach less than impactful, and while Wilson leans into the sorrow as best he can, doesn’t have the dramatic screen presence the character ultimately needs. However, others pull up the slack, with good work from David Selby doing double-duty on roles I won’t spoil and especially Decker, who leaps head first into the witchy joys of playing evil, one done so by the hands of those that should have protected her. She’s great fun to watch.
Loon Lake may not have big studio punch or gloss, but is nonetheless solid fodder for fans of the genre, stocked with some good haunts, good direction, and more than enough hooks to keep it interesting, including an ending that feels properly earned. Recommended.
Loon Lake is now streaming on Amazon Prime.