In 1976, two journalists travel to the French-Swiss border to help investigate/document a series of cattle mutilations and strange animal deaths. They are working for a television station and are to meet up with a scientific team that is going to take them to visit all the troubled spots. The team has gone missing, however, and the journalists are escorted into the mountains by a British biologist and an American forensic investigator, both of whom were brought in to help solve the mystery. They meet with guides and off they go. What follows is a lot of hiking and talking before they run across their first dead body, and then things take a turn for the worse. Something is out there in the wilderness, and it’s hunting them down.
Cold Ground is a French Found Footage film, meaning we get lots of shaky shots and things happening off-camera with a bunch of subtitles. For the most part, it’s a decent little movie, although it adheres to the tropes of the subgenre a little too much. Do we really need another scene of people sitting in a tent, hearing something strange outside, and then the tent gets shaken? And I am more than willing to suspend disbelief about a lot of the things that go on in Found Footage films, but I simply can’t take some of the smaller indiscretions anymore. There’s a scene where one of the characters ends up in a cave and we get seemingly endless shots of the ceiling of the cave as this person tries walks along the corridors, looking for a way out. Sure, they need the camera light to see, so it makes sense to keep filming, but who in their right mind walks through a blackened cave training the light straight up instead of illuminating where they are walking? It doesn’t make sense, and I will put up with a thousand hours of people running for their lives and not being able to see what’s going on over tiny, silly moments like this. All that being said, when the monster attacks happen, they do get that right. There is a certain power that Found Footage has that other subgenres don’t, and that’s the ability to capture the immediacy of the terror they are confronting. When something mysterious and unknown happens, we as an audience get to experience it just like the characters do, and in a more intimate and personal way than when the camera we’re watching it from is set up to the side and detached. Found Footage can always, always win these moments as truly authentic, if they do it right. And Cold Ground gets this most important aspect down perfectly. In other words, when they get attacked, it is absolutely scary as hell.
Despite an almost terminal case of “seen this a thousand times before,” Cold Ground is a film that gets the very basics of Horror right, and in that sense, it’s a really good movie. If you can get past the same storytelling tropes that comes with Found Footage (“Here they are driving to the horror that awaits, joking and laughing in the car as the scenery goes by behind them,” “Here’s a shaking tent,” “Here’s people doing stupid things just to keep hold of a camera so they can keep filming,” etc.), you will actually find yourself having a good time. The other thing that this movie gets right that so many others of its ilk does not, is that it doesn’t wait until the last ten minutes to reveal the horror. In this one, about fifty minutes in, the smackdown comes, and after that, it’s on. So approach with patience and you will be rewarded. Still, the stereotypical elements keep me from rating this any higher.