Visions, Viscera, and the Void

Read Time:4 Minute, 49 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Kryptic
–

Genre: Drama, Horror, Thriller
Year Released: 2024, 2025
Runtime: 1h 36m
Director(s): Kourtney Roy
Writer(s): Paul Bromley
Cast: Chloe Pirrie, Jeff Gladstone, Jason Deline, Ali Rusu-Tahir, Kamantha Naidoo, Jenna Hill, Pam Kearns, Jane Stanton, Sara Southey, Jennifer Copping, Moses Wamukoya
Where to Watch: coming to Digital on May 9, 2025, from Well Go USA

RAVING REVIEW: There’s ambition behind the camera, no doubt about that. This is one of those projects that dares to layer psychological disorientation with genre panache, wrapping its questions in cryptic symbolism and unsettling imagery. But what begins as a mysterious plunge into one woman's fractured identity quickly turns into a tangled knot of missed potential. There's creativity lurking in the shadows here—unfortunately, it's surrounded by a narrative that often seems lost in its fog.

KRYPTIC centers on Kay, a woman whose hiking trip takes a strange turn when she finds herself detached from time, memory, and even her sense of self. What should have been a moment of personal retreat quickly spirals into something far stranger, as she becomes consumed with a legend and the eerie disappearance of a researcher. As Kay follows a loose trail of leads, what unfolds feels more like an improvised scavenger hunt than a tightly plotted descent. Every conversation offers half a clue, every encounter promises answers that never arrive, and the entire structure seems to exist just to drift toward ambiguity rather than resolution.

In her first feature as director, Kourtney Roy shows a clear eye for visual storytelling. Many of the compositions, particularly the forest scenes, have a calculated stillness that helps conjure an eerie atmosphere. Her background as a photographer seeps into the aesthetics—when KRYPTIC slows down enough to let the images speak, the results are often stark and mesmerizing.

Chloe Pirrie leads the film with a performance that fluctuates between haunting stillness and moments of unraveling intensity. She carries the movie's weight on her shoulders, often acting as our only anchor as the story dances between myth, memory, and hallucination. In the film’s second half, as Kay's identity, Pirrie's performance becomes more engaging. However, in earlier stretches, the character often feels adrift not just narratively, but emotionally, leaving us waiting for a connection that doesn't always come.

Much of the film's structure leans on nonlinear storytelling, which, in theory, could enhance its dreamlike effect. But without enough emotional signposts or logical consistency to tether viewers, the narrative veers toward being frustratingly opaque. The screenplay is dense with metaphor and thematic suggestion, but the groundwork isn’t solid enough to support the film's many ambitions.

What might have helped is a stronger sense of purpose in the script. Instead of building tension through plot escalation or character evolution, the film moves laterally, offering scene after scene of ambiguous dialogue, uncanny images, and encounters with characters who feel more like concepts than people. These detours might have worked if they culminated in any crescendo, but instead, they fizzle out, feeling like stylish distractions more than integral components.

There are also scattered moments of inspired world-building—the kind of strange, off-kilter characters you hope to remember after the credits roll. A motel owner obsessed with hikers’ paranormal stories, a mysterious figure who claims to have seen it all, a cryptozoologist's grieving partner—these characters could have grounded the story emotionally or thematically. But they vanish from the narrative as quickly as they appear, which leaves their presence feeling like set dressing rather than narrative anchors.

Still, it’s not an empty effort. There's artistic merit in the risk-taking and a style in Roy's visual direction that suggests better work is ahead. The potential is present in the bones of the project—it’s just buried under too much clutter and too little clarity. Had the film made firmer decisions about what it wanted to say—and more importantly, how it tried to say it—it might’ve been a striking psychological descent. Instead, it settles for being a mood piece without a pulse.

KRYPTIC tries to be a fever dream of memory loss, lore, and emotional unraveling, but it gets stuck between concept and execution. It’s a film that wants to haunt but doesn’t linger long enough in its ideas to leave a lasting mark. There's talent here and flashes of intrigue, but they don’t coalesce.

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[photo courtesy of WELL GO USA]

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