# Loner

There is something wonderfully wrong about going on a wilderness retreat intended to strip away the modern world and taking a coffee grinder with you.

That small absurdity tells us almost everything we need to know about Angus. He is an unsuccessful vlogger performing a version of himself that barely exists: outdoorsman, boyfriend, interesting person, possibly somebody whose audience extends beyond two increasingly concerned relatives. He catches fish by bringing a dead one with him, gets bored halfway through grinding his coffee and seems genuinely surprised that the middle of nowhere has failed to provide Wi-Fi.

Initially, *Loner* is very funny about this. Then it starts doing something considerably nastier.

Because Angus does not simply exaggerate for his viewers. He has constructed an existence and begun living inside it. The clever thing about Charlie Robb's found-footage approach is that the camera is not merely recording an unreliable narrator. It is the machinery by which Angus keeps creating him. Are we watching what happened, what Angus wants us to think happened, or what Angus himself now needs to believe happened?

Sending that particular man into the Northumbrian woods gives *Loner* its best idea. Angus arrives believing reality is something you can edit, package and upload. The forest appears to operate according to a much older arrangement.

Things disappear. Something moves at the edge of vision. Bones accumulate. There are suggestions of a forest spirit and, crucially, of an economy based on offering and sacrifice. Angus keeps taking while giving nothing back. Eventually, something starts collecting.

Or perhaps it does not.

There is a workable reading in which Angus has stumbled into an old folkloric system, Eve becomes the sacrifice that buys his escape and the appalling gift of flesh marks his transformation. There is another in which Angus, starving and psychologically collapsing, has done something considerably more human and considerably worse, then folded it into the mythology he is already telling himself.

The film is smart enough to make both explanations troublesome. A stolen lighter apparently returned by being sewn into Angus's flesh is inconvenient for the "he imagined everything" camp. But Angus's entire relationship with truth makes accepting his version of events equally hazardous.

That tension is where *Loner* earns its ambiguity.

Robb's performance holds the film together. Angus begins as somebody enormously easy to dislike and gradually becomes pathetic, frightened and oddly sympathetic without ever becoming particularly admirable. His cowardice matters. When Eve needs him, he fails her. When his wilderness expertise is tested, it evaporates. The man selling self-sufficiency cannot actually cope with being alone.

The film itself does not always exploit that isolation as well as it might. There are too many daylight stretches where the woods become somewhere Angus wanders around rather than somewhere actively closing around him. The chronology becomes unnecessarily slippery, and some of the folklore arrives with the faint whiff of a book being opened because the screenplay needs to explain something.

But *Loner* improves in retrospect. By the end Angus has returned to civilisation, developed an alarming enthusiasm for raw meat and chosen the woods again. Whether he has found himself, surrendered himself, become a cannibal or entered into some older sacrificial arrangement remains usefully unresolved.

Is it folk horror? It has the landscape, the outsider, sacrifice, old belief and something in the woods that may have been there considerably longer than Angus's YouTube channel. What it lacks is a fully convincing folkloric system beneath those things. The folklore sometimes feels used rather than lived.

Perhaps that is appropriate. Angus is using everything too.

So *Loner* may be less straightforward folk horror than folk horror about somebody trying to turn folk horror into content, only to discover that the old story has started editing him instead.

It is messy, funny, occasionally frustrating and much cleverer than its coffee-grinder-carrying protagonist. More importantly, it is the rare film that became better the longer we argued about what on earth it had just done.

---

Reviewed by FolknHell, the folk horror film podcast · folknhell com
Hear the full FolknHell podcast discussion of Loner: folknhell com/loner-review
Along with our other reviews, transcripts and episodes at: folknhell com
please note: the episode from FolkNHell about *Loner* will be published on 17th September