‘Wrong Turn’ (2021) Movie Review

In this revamp of the 2003 fan favorite, original screenwriter Alan McElroy returns to tell an all-new story about a different group of twentysomethings (Charlotte Vega, Adain Bradley, Emma Dumont, Dylan McTee, Vardaan Arora, Adrien Favela) who venture into the Appalachian backwoods and encounter an independent tribal society deep in the forest. After they disappear, one of the women’s fathers (Matthew Modine) decides to come looking for them.

The original Wrong Turn was a survival story about fighting off a family of inbred cannibals, which is a classic trope in horror. But after five sequels, despite the second one actually being pretty fun, it just got old and stopped being interesting. The idea of a reboot was a risky one, to say the least. After all, the franchise had more than overstayed its welcome. What else could you do with it? Well, Alan McElroy seems to have cracked the code, because Wrong Turn (2021) is surprisingly awesome! It’s got some flaws, some of which were also present in the franchise’s original run, but this new one is really solid. Moving away from the redneck cannibal route was a good course of action, because these new antagonists, known as The Foundation, are quite intimidating. The fact that they are seemingly normal people who just live like savages provides not so much an instant revulsion, but a sense of dissonant dread. It’s almost like the film begins as a Wrong Turn movie and then evolves into The Wicker Man. In fact, I have no problem saying that this is the best Wrong Turn film to date.

The tribe’s leader, played by Bill Sage, has awesome presence and gravitas, and you can feel the helplessness of the other characters when he’s there. In fact, all of the acting is pretty good. The protagonists don’t just feel like fodder, they feel like actual people. It’s not like the movie is an in-depth character study or anything, but none of them feel like they’ve just been reduced to a trait, especially Vega and Bradley. As is pretty typical, Matthew Modine is just awesome. You never get the impression that he’s phoning it in just because it’s a genre picture. He’s actually acting, and he’s damn good. There was another particularly fine performance in veteran “that guy from that thing” Tim DeZarn. He plays a surly old man who lives in the neighboring town, but he ends up getting a bit more development than most characters of that trope tend to get.

The film’s strongest asset, next to Modine’s impassioned performance, is the brutal violence. Yet another constant hindrance of the later sequels was the fact that even the gore was getting stale because there just wasn’t anything interesting attached to it. The effects also tended to lessen in quality with each subsequent film. In this movie’s case, not only is the gore visceral and effective, the change in tone makes it hit 10x harder. The first few films had a very twenty-oughts feel to them, with their fast editing, dude-bro characters, obnoxious fake-out jump scares, and brownish aesthetic. With the new 2021 Wrong Turn, the tone is decidedly colder and grimier, and it’s far less likely to appear dated to future audiences. And there is some pretty gruesome stuff in this one. It’s an unsettling and truly frightening picture. I also really have to give a lot of credit to production designer Roshelle Berliner. The look and feel of the Foundation and their village is so ominous, but it also feels very real. It never goes into more conventional “movie cult” territory.

The two more noticeable flaws of the film are not exactly uncommon among movies like this, but they are still worth noting. The first is that, of course, the protagonists aren’t exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer, and they make some questionable decisions. This is pretty standard in horror, so I’ve always been a bit more lenient than others on that. My main qualm with the movie is that there are a couple of times in which I think they were attempting some sociopolitical commentary, and it falls flat. The movie seems to flirt with addressing class distinction, but then they don’t actually make any sort of point about it. It’s almost like they wanted to acknowledge the direction in which they could have gone, but decided not to actually go for it. For all I know, this could have been completely unintentional, but it was still a bit odd.

The Wrong Turn franchise gets a very welcome upgrade in this 2021 reset. Alan McElroy’s script is one of the strongest he’s ever written, and its cast is absolutely stellar. While it may fall prey to some of the standard pitfalls of similar horror, the gruesome violence is packs a hell of a punch, and the look and feel of the movie is excellent.

SCORE: 4.5/5