Rust Creek is a thriller about an overachieving college student who gets lost on her way to a job interview, leaving her stranded deep in the Kentucky forest.
One of the more frustrating setbacks of most movies like Jen McGowan‘s Rust Creek is the poor decisions characters often make, leading them into all kinds of messy mayhem. They go into the wrong house, go up rather than out of them, talk to the wrong people at all the wrong gas stations, don’t use their phone when they should. The list seems endless. So it’s more than a little refreshing to see the setup for what happens in Rust Creek take a more convincing turn even if the film never quite separates itself from the pack. A modest thriller with a fixed outcome, it finds it footing more times than not, keeping this a well-made outing in some well-tread footsteps.
We meet Sawyer (Hermione Corfield), a college woman on her way to a job interview, who follows her GPS into the deep woods of Kentucky, clearly off the path she should be on. Pausing on the side of a back road to look at an actual map, she is greeted by a couple of local good ol’ boys who drive up and offer some help, or so it seems. They are Hollister (Micah Hauptman) and Buck (Daniel R. Hill), who think she has actually seen them burying something in the ground (even though she hasn’t). Naturally, they try to molest her, but she manages to escape and heads into the trees, badly injured, soon coming upon a man named Lowell (Jay Paulson), who looks likely to help. However, her real struggle for survival has just begun.
So a young attractive girl on the run, hunted by animalistic men is certainly not anything new to this genre, though McGowan understands this enough to both embrace some of the more obvious conventions while leaning on some new legs in giving it personality. Sawyer isn’t exactly resourceful, not positioned to be a vengeful Macgyver type who somehow finds outsmarts her prey. She’s always at odds in this environment, reduced to instinctive impulses to try and stay alive. She is patient though and uses words more than fists to find her way free.
That leads to some genuinely good moments, especially early on that crank up a bit of suspense. Unfortunately, it’s not always sustainable, the story forced to wedge in characters and situations that don’t always ring true, including the obvious shenanigans with the local law enforcement and selected bits of dialogue between Sawyer and Lowell. This is mostly forgivable though given the good work McGowan does behind the camera, who is very good with telling a visual story, the film’s best bits often when there’s no one talking and the images take the lead.
Still, there’s not much reason for Rust Creek to exist, another in an already too long list of movies of the like, but that could be said of most movies I suppose. At least it tries to build some sort of meaningful relationship between some of these people even if we never truly feel connected to any of them. Corfield does her best with the limitations while the men she faces off against fit the menacing hillbilly mold as well as can be expected. This isn’t an ultraviolent slice of mayhem, instead a rather quiet exercise in steady suspense and for that, is a worthy little experiment.