Slash/Back
starring Tasiana Shirley, Alexis Wolfe, Nalajoss Ellsworth, Chelsea Prusky, Frankie Vincent-Wolfe, Rory Anawak, Kristian Bruun and Shaun Benson
screenplay by Nyla Innuksuk and Ryan Cavan
directed by Nyka Innuksuk
Rating ♦♦◊◊◊
I watched this movie on an airplane. At first, I ignored it because the synopsis sounded silly. But a relative told me that he had watched it, and on the basis of his opinion I decided that the next time I boarded an airplane I would watch it if it was on the entertainment menu, which it was. So, I did.
In short, a group of teenaged Inuit girls fight off an alien invasion in the Canadian Arctic. The story somewhat parallels the plot of the 1982 John Carpenter movie The Thing (starring Kurt Russell), which the girls admire and are constantly referencing.
Strange things are happening in the girls’ fishing village. After a time, they figure out that aliens are taking over the bodies of animals and humans. Being Inuit girls, theirs is a hunting culture and they have access to firearms. Using single-action hunting rifles they kill as many of the things as possible until the aliens are scared away and flee the earth.
The original The Thing is still a great movie. I prefer it to the 2011 prequel of the same name directed by Matthijis van Heijniingen, Jr., starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and others.
The movie was filmed on Canada’s Baffin Island in the summer of 2019. I don’t know much about Canada’s Inuit, and I don’t think about them very often, so it was interesting to see young Inuit people on film, speaking English with an occasional inclusion of Inuktitut, living in normal houses, wearing familiar clothes, playing games on their smartphones, behaving like adolescents everywhere.