Movie Review: The Atlas Field

The Atlas Field: Directed by Sid Lucero and starring Davide Fusinato, Giuseppe Pestillo & Christopher Tetrokan

Every once in a while you watch a movie and come away thinking, “I didn’t hate it…but I’m also not exactly rushing to watch it again.” THE ATLAS FIELD is one of those movies for me.

 Directed by Sid Lucero, this atmospheric little horror film follows Daniel, a man suffering from a terminal illness, who convinces his brother Henry to return to a mountain from their childhood. What starts out as a trip filled with old memories slowly turns into something much stranger as reality itself begins to unravel around them. And I’ll give the movie credit: there’s definitely an interesting idea buried in here.

 The whole concept of two brothers returning to a place from their past while the world around them starts becoming increasingly unreliable has a lot of potential. There are some genuinely creepy moments, and the movie does a pretty good job creating an uneasy atmosphere. You get that feeling that something is very wrong long before you completely understand what that something actually is. The problem for me is that THE ATLAS FIELD never quite grabbed me the way I wanted it to. It’s one of those movies where I could appreciate what it was trying to accomplish more than I actually enjoyed watching it. The pacing is deliberate, the story is intentionally mysterious, and there are stretches where you’re left trying to piece together exactly what the hell is happening. Normally, I’m perfectly fine with that. Give me a weird, ambiguous horror movie and I’ll happily sit there trying to figure the damn thing out.

 But here, I found myself getting a little more detached from the story than intrigued by it. There are some good performances from Davide Fusinato and Giuseppe Pestillo, and the isolated mountain setting definitely helps create the right atmosphere. There’s a bleakness hanging over the whole thing that fits the story really well. I just wish the movie had given me a little more to latch onto along the way. That doesn’t mean THE ATLAS FIELD is bad. It’s not. I can absolutely see this working for someone who enjoys slower, atmospheric horror that focuses more on mood, psychological unease and unraveling reality than traditional scares. For me, though, it landed somewhere in the middle. There were things I liked. There were things I appreciated. And there were definitely moments where I thought, “Okay, NOW we’re getting somewhere.” But when the credits rolled, I was basically left with a shrug.

 Not every horror movie has to knock you over. Sometimes you watch one, appreciate what it was trying to do, and move on to the next one. THE ATLAS FIELD is that movie for me.