Slash/Back – review

Director: Nyla Innuksuk

Release date: 2022

Contains spoilers

Adding in elements that explore the coming of age of Inuit girls (this film tells its story through the eyes of a group of girls), and also touching on questions of alienation from tradition as these indigenous youth push away from their collective past but discover they need that tradition to survive, Slash/Back is a film that skirts around horror (it is perhaps a little more action, though has some tentacled moments and some interesting body horror) as it uses that youth lens but has alien vampires.

Tasiana Shirley as Maika

It begins on a ship as a father teaches his daughter Maika (played young by Niviaq Mike and older by Tasiana Shirley) to hunt. This is followed by a man out in the wild, in modern day, who sees something odd in the snow and is killed, with an implication that it has his face off. Elsewhere the older Maika seems embarrassed by her father and mother and both estranged from and ashamed of her indigenous heritage. We see this in things as simple as responding to her parents in English, to her desire to attack traditional art and food and dislike of her home, the town of Pangnirtung, Nunavut.

spotting the bear

After a moment where her little sister, Aju (Frankie Vincent-Wolfe), has some money conned from her by Maika’s friend Uki (the tough-as-nails Nalajoss Ellsworth) and she gets it back, she takes her father’s rifle and she, Uki, Jesse (Alexis Wolfe) and Lenna (Chelsea Prusky) take a boat out to the Land and leave Aju behind. After Uki has bragged about being a great shot, and Maika has refused to show off her shooting skills, they spot a bear acting odd, it walks strangely. About this time Aju finds them – having cycled – when Uki shoots the bear.

the bear attacks

It falls and then suddenly it is up and runs at Aju, who is frozen. It is on her before Maika can load and shoot but, once Maika can get the shot off, it falls and the young girl is shaken but otherwise unharmed. However, she is covered in a black oily substance, rather than blood. They return to the town and we see a tentacle or snake like thing emerge from the bear’s eye-socket and slink away. Back home the girls talk to their contemporaries about what happened – Uki suggests it was Ijirak – shapeshifting creatures that steal children in Inuit folklore but Maika reacts vehemently against the thought that it might be anything like that.

the parasite infested fox 

Having been invited to a party when the adults are out (it is solstice and the adults have a dance organised) the girls go out – with the grounded Lenna sneaking out and Uki not to be found as she has gone back to the Land because of a dare by Maika. There Uki sees a group of animals acting odd around a shape – which she realises is draining blood when it attaches a tentacle to prey and later suggests is some sort of ship (the leaps to understand what is occurring in this are taken on faith) – and is attacked by an artic fox. The fox has tentacles that emerge from its eyes and mouth and Uki manages to kill it by slitting its throat – getting the black blood on herself in the process.

wearing the cop like a disguise

Back at the village she crashes the party to tell everyone about the hunter aliens but we have seen a polar bear attack a cop and he has been taken over and enters the party hunting Uki. So, the aliens do drink blood, draining their prey dry, but then may wear the kill like an ill-fitting skin and can smell their own blood. They are hunting Uki and Aju until the primary girls turn the tables and, embracing their own traditions, hunt them back. As they work out what is happening they also work out that the blood fuels the aliens so their flesh puppets are quicker and stronger but falter when they run out of fuel, as it were. We do get a face ripped away and see inside one of the possessed (possessed is perhaps a bit strong given that it is more wearing skin).

the girls hunt the aliens

This is good fun, it is simplistic in how it explains the lore – as I said above the girls just seem to work out things in great narrative explaining leaps, but there are fab moments, like Maika and Jesse suddenly ignoring they are looking for killer alien parasites wearing a person as a disguise and argue over a boy. The tension between tradition and modernity is explored well – a line about folklore being old people stories made up because there was no internet was inciteful in its summing up of that tension. The acting is sometimes faltering, but works as a group of kids becoming adults and exposes their awkwardness.

face (mask) removed

The effects are fun – the fact that the human/aliens look like masks work, because they are actually skin masks and I enjoyed their inhuman, jerky movements. The whole effect side has a B quality to it that works with the sci-fi element. There is a whole bit of this that feels like a homage to the Thing – apt as we get Jesse explaining the plot of the film. There is an element of social justice with Maika wearing a jacket that says “No justice on stolen land”, a Caucasian cop hassling the kids and the film title, at the end, morphing to Land Back – so of course the idea of aliens coming, killing the animals and draining the blood of the animals and people fits into that narrative.

feeding

On the other hand, as fun as this is it does struggle to carry a horror element as well as it might, as well as moving the narrative explanations with leaps that felt too much of a character’s logical leap and so I think 6 out of 10 is fair. The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Shudder via Amazon UK