Lucy, the responsible sibling who stayed behind to see her father through to the end, organises a morbid family reunion with her estranged older sister Carla and gentle, awkward younger brother Drew: taking their late father's beloved boat down his favourite river to scatter his ashes. Long-simmering family tensions resurface almost immediately, but they become the least of the siblings' problems once their boat breaks down and they realise a masked, faceless killer has been stalking them from the shoreline. Stranded and increasingly desperate, the three must survive a night of escalating violence in a landscape as beautiful as it is lethal. A lean, visceral slasher that trusts atmosphere and craft over easy shocks, its striking use of sound design and point-of-view camerawork announcing a genuinely exciting new genre filmmaker, anchored by two committed, physically fearless lead performances.

Writer-director Joshua Giuliano has said the story grew out of his own anxieties about visiting family – the excitement of reunion tangled with old, unresolved tension – and cites 1970s classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween as touchstones, alongside more unexpected influences including Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker and Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock. The film was shot on location in West Virginia, and its guiding visual idea, pairing extreme natural beauty with sudden brutality in the same frame, deliberately unsettles the audience rather than telling them how to feel.