Round the Decay – review

Director: Adam Newman

Release date: 2025

Contains spoilers

A creature feature, the creature within it had overtones of the wendigo and aspects that seem vampiric but is actually called a wrexsoul (Rachel Pizzolato). A google only revealed the name used for a boss in Final Fantasy VI. The film suggests that it is a possession of a dead individual and that it feeds both on flesh and souls.

The opening of the film sees a native woman (Kamarra Cole) running through forests. She is captured and brought before colonial leader Whelon Newport (Roger Clark) and his wife, Mary (McKenna Parsons). The woman doesn’t respond to his questions, despite the fact that he supposes she does understand him. He starts lecturing her and mentions a sacrifice being needed – at which point he stabs Mary. He explains that only monsters can hunt monsters (clearly equating the indigenous people with monsters), Mary seems to come back to life and the woman screams.

Victoria Mirrer as Kenzi

In a modern day setting we see a gazebo at night, Kenzie (Victoria Mirrer) sits in it and is approached by a man, Zach (Topher Hansson). She is engaged but, it becomes apparent, her fiancé is Zach and his approach is a game, but one she is not responsive to. As the film goes on we discover this is a flashback to a vacation where she broke the engagement off, he went missing in a cave and she has returned for closure. The hotel she stays at has just been bought by Bart (Cary Hite). At a town meeting he tries to offer his vision for tourism but is shouted down by a hostile audience of locals who have heard it all before. Also staying at the hotel is Munroe (Damian Maffei, Nikos the Impaler) a professional monster hunter.

booby trap

The town leader is Gregory Newport (Jamie Dufault), descendent of Whelon. He and the town are aware of the wrexsoul and feed people to her – they arrange for itinerant hotel worker Roz (Sienna Hubert-Ross) to be knocked out and dropped down a shaft into her cave. There are also a group of hikers, some of whom enter the (poorly blocked) cave. The cave has booby traps – one of the hikers (Sassan Saffari) is garrotted on razor wire and another, Aida (Alexis Safoyan), flees with Roz… The wrexsoul is on the hunt and no one in town is safe.

the wrexsoul

The creature itself is clearly what has become of Mary’s body. It has heavy feet, claws and a face that is all teeth and monstrosity. The practical effect was good except for the times it wasn’t. The wrexsoul’s head is clearly a mask but the shooting uses darkness and not showing the head often to maintain an illusion of the monster. Unfortunately the body suit is clearly that, which is a shame. The creature feasts on flesh but eating the soul is mentioned, its speech is an echolalia of victims' words, and it has their memories – so it knows Kenzie as it ate Zach. It hasn’t got the best vision (it might walk past someone staying still), though it detects movement and has sharp ears.

wrexsoul vision

Munroe has been called in by a disgruntled group that live in the town, who themselves had been drafted in to boobytrap the cave (a precaution after Zach became lost there), His sources suggest that, to kill the creature, he first needs to end the bloodline of the one who created it – in other words kill Gregory – and then kill it. Due to its toughness he thinks that fire should be employed. The creature, as I mentioned, feels a tad wendigo but the spirit at the heart of the wrexsoul is vampirically possessing the body of the sacrifice (Mary) and eating flesh and souls and so the film has that vampire aspect though for the most part it is creature feature.

Cary Hite as Bart

And it does the creature feature well enough, though it is pretty by the numbers. The central characters are quite numerous but the filmmakers keep track of them for the viewer competently. The issue with the characters is that had there been fewer they would have been able to be expanded on them that bit more. The gore, when we see it, is done well, but more may have been better. Overall, competent but it won’t set the world on fire. 5.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.