A lifetime of watching movies has taught me many lessons. Among them are:

• If you are in the military, never tell the people you’re serving with that you can’t wait to get home to your family, because you will be immediately killed.
• Mysterious loud noises are usually just a cat.
• Taking off your glasses makes you instantly fifty percent more attractive.
• If you meet someone and don’t like them, you’ll probably end up having sex with them.
• When people cough, it means they’re going to die soon.
• You can order “a beer” in a bar, and the bartender will never ask you what kind of beer you want.

Perhaps my favorite cinematic cliche is the idea that bad things only ever happen when you and your friends go to a secluded cabin in the woods. What kinds of bad things? You might get stalked by a hockey masked-wearing Mama’s boy. You might be set upon by Deadites. Fanatics may ask you to sacrifice a member of your family to avert the apocalypse. Your cabin may actually be a front for a technologically sophisticated group performing an annual rite to also avert the apocalypse, one where you are nothing more than a pawn!

We have to put up with all this, because if you have a) a cabin and b) the woods, you’ve just made the budget of your movie very reasonable. I have seen many cabin in the woods movies, and I have no doubt I’ll see many more. If nothing else, Refuge, the new indie thriller, is definitely one of them.

It begins with an anguished 911 call. Sam (Adam Sinclair) begs for help. His young daughter Sophie has vanished. Four years pass, and Sophie has stayed vanished. Sam replays the events leading up to her disappearance in his mind, over and over. Gradually, a plan forms, and the first thing Sam does is get a revolver.

Next, Sam throws a party, and invites his longtime friends to his secluded cabin. They are Mike (Adam Dorsey), Mike’s younger brother Jay (Christopher Dietrick), and Barry (Donald Paul). As far as the guys know, the plan is to get super wasted, nosh on some high calorie snacks, and have a lost weekend but in a good way.

That’s their plan, but it’s not Sam’s plan. The next step involves drugging all the booze. Barry, Jay, and Mike pass out, and when they awaken later, they discover that they’ve been duct-taped to chairs. Sam informs them that prior to her disappearance, Sophie mentioned one of them in her diary – in the most incriminating way possible. 

One of Sam’s friends knows what happened to Sophie. It could be Barry, the squeaky-clean success with a highly unsavory sexual past. It could be Mike, the teacher with seething anger issues. It could be Jay, the screwup on wheels with a history of substance abuse and poor decisions. Whoever it is, Sam is willing to do anything to his friends to get answers.

Director Anton Sigurdsson has made a nasty piece of business, which is fitting considering the subject matter. A lot of Refuge involves guys screaming as they’re tied up while another guy waves around a gun and either screams or whispers. Once in a while, a blowtorch is used, or someone is exposed to horrific cranial trauma. Large stretches of the film are genuinely tense, yet they’re tense in a freak show kind of way. We’re waiting for the next awful thing to happen, and when it does, it’s usually pretty awful! Does that mean the film is a success? Kind of?

The core problems I can see come from Sigurdsson’s screenplay. First, while a little time is spent with the group before things go sideways, I would have liked more time drilling down into their interpersonal relationships and the resulting betrayals. They all turn on each other relatively quickly, so are we to assume that their friendships were only ever superficial? Is that the case for all four of them? If so, that’s a real problem from a character standpoint since you want the characters in your screenplay to be…y’know…distinctive. When the reveal of the culprit takes place, it should hit like a hammer for everyone, including the malefactor. Plus, it should be the logical end result of a number of links in an informational chain. Instead, it feels like it kind of comes out of nowhere. As I watched, I said out loud, “Wait, what? He did it?” Perhaps this was a me problem, but I wanted the reveal to feel inevitable, like we were always heading for the awful truth.

I thought the cast was solid, and that they would have benefitted from another, stronger draft of the script. As Sam, Adam Sinclair only gets to play degrees of seething rage. If he ever doubts himself or doubts the evidence he presents, he rarely shows it. Those shades of gray would have made him more compelling. The same goes for the sibling dynamic between Adam Dorsey’s Mike and Christopher Dietrick’s Jay. We’ve seen this before, the idea that one sibling is a screwup and the other harbors years of resentment. I would have liked a little more complexity in their relationship, and I have no doubt Dietrick and Dorsey could have pulled it off. Donald Paul does nice work portraying the professional success Barry who has a graveyard of skeletons in his closet. I wished he had a little more to do, but a running joke where Barry cries when he gets stressed is fun.

If there’s one thing I learned after having watched Refuge, it’s that you should never go to a cabin in the woods. If your friends invite you to their cousin’s cabin in the Colorado mountains, those people are not your friends. Refuge promises hard-hitting psychological suspense, and it somewhat delivers on that. What it really taught me is that living in the suburbs is pretty cool.

Tim Brennan Movie Critic

Tim has been alarmingly enthusiastic about movies ever since childhood. He grew up in Boulder and, foolishly, left Colorado to study Communications in Washington State. Making matters worse, he moved to Connecticut after meeting his too-good-for-him wife. Drawn by the Rockies and a mild climate, he triumphantly returned and settled down back in Boulder County. He's written numerous screenplays, loves hiking, and embarrassed himself in front of Samuel L. Jackson. True story.