The film starts out with a one sided view of a visit to the psychiatrist's office. This is just one of the subtle, yet tightly integrated elements of the plot and the highly focused character study of Guilian that will keep you thinking for the first 50 minutes of the film.
We know it's going to be a stalker in the woods film from the start. Consider the genre for a moment. Over the top gore. Hockey Masks and decapitations. Chainsaws and villains wearing other people's skin. These are plot devices right out of the same fantasy world as light sabers and gremlins. Even the rabid man-eating animal, usually a bear, fallen out of favor recently with the exception of Wolf, is pretty contrived. But here is a film that simply presents you with off-balanced characters, and others that we can detect have something creepy lurking below their surface, without contriving anything too obvious to make it seem in forced and cliche.
Annie Clark's performance is top rate. She makes believable the kind of hide-in-your-sleeping bag naiveté of someone afraid of animal sounds in the night with the savvy of a teenage girls who knows better than to tell someone she is all alone in the woods for two days. Her character arc follows the path of Ripley and Sarah Conner, yet it doesn't seem forced. We hope her future projects track more in the direction of Ms. Weaver than Ms. Hamilton. This is not "The Glass House", where the highlight of the characters performance is her bikini scene. We love the genuine beauty of the woods and the green eyed gaze of Ms. Clark as she looks for a way forward from a personal tragedy of her past.
In the last 20 minutes of the film, there are a few tropes to be reckoned with. The engine that won't start. The rescuer knocked out from behind. But even so, this is no "Blair Witch Project" where chicanery with the camera work demand attention that is drawn away from the lack of plot, nor is it a big budget affair with or over the top set pieces designed to distract from deficient writing.
The film is great at getting and holding scenes of tension. That is what a suspense film should do first, and it that regard I highly recommend Solo. Watch it alone, a few days before your (or your child's) next camping trip (I don't mean trip to an RV campsite, I mean real camping in the public game preserve or even your large suburban back yard) and I guarantee you'll have trouble going to sleep.
