Metacritic reviews

Solid performances from the small cast and robust visuals will be clear selling points with audiences seeking the raw excitement of an elemental survival film.

[A] solid, well-executed testament to the horrors of the great outdoors.

Another way of reading a movie like this is that it channels our ancient hatred of nature while recognizing that it’s essentially nostalgic, and that the occasional hungry ursine cannot compete with the animal we really have reason to fear.

While there is some gore late in the film, what makes Backcountry special is the care and patience it invests in its characters and the quiet, haunting tension of its story line.

Without effective characterization to drive the moments in between, the spectacle of humans painfully, extensively, gratuitously suffering for their arrogance is more sadistic than thrilling.

After a surprising development, the film grows slack and sentimental, reverting to the survival-movie platitude about hardship making you a better human.

It’s all pretty effective but in the end, somehow empty. Not to make an unfair comparison to a classic, but the movie “Deliverance” actually followed through on all of the themes that its storyline suggested, while in Backcountry, we end up with a storyline in which all but the most elemental stuff winds up as window dressing.

Just when you thought it was safe to stand up to a bear in the woods, this jarring indie horror drama will make you scurry back indoors.

Writer-director Adam MacDonald's direction creates an ominous sense of rural-nowhere isolation, and his script avoids contrived banter while shrewdly suggesting it's headed toward horror before unexpectedly veering into survival-story territory. Nonetheless, such misdirection can't compensate for hopelessly routine action.

Mr. MacDonald’s ability to notch up dread moment by moment — with a rustle of leaves, the snap of a twig — is all the more impressive given that it takes a while to warm up to the two souls he cuts loose in those woods.