Dark secrets, sex and more are unveiled on a trip into the isolated wilderness. This sounds familiar, mostly because it was examined with such ferocity and humor in the recently released Harpoon. Like that movie, here we have a movie that wants to present a similarly dire situation where a group of friends ultimately turn on each other, but it never quite reaches the same levels. Some people have said that Harpoon would have worked better without the dry narrator and to that, I counter with Witches in the Woods.

It starts with a rather large group of friends who all have similar names. There’s Jill (Hannah Kasulka), the seemingly goody two shoes who wants to study while on the drive. Her boyfriend Derek (Craig Arnold) is that douchey bro with slicked back hair and peach fuzz who has a secret beef with Phil (Corbin Bleu), a star football player who got injured and has used that as an excuse to not play. There’s brothers Tod (Kyle Mac) and Matty (Alexander De Jordy) who has come with his new bitchy girlfriend Bree (Humberly González).

And then there’s Alison (Sasha Clements) who doesn’t really want to be there because she was just on the receiving end of some viral video, presumably of a sexual nature, that was taken of her. What’s worse is that two members of the car might have been there the night it happened. Oh and Phil is secretly seeing Jill on the side.

Whew. I think that about covers it.

Basically, this group has issues. I’m not sure that they would even be friends in the non-cinematic world because most of them are uniformly terrible people. The menfolk use misogynistic language to insult each other, telling one to grab a tampon for his heavy flow or calling each other pussies. Or when things get really tense, one of them will call the sole black character a “hoodrat.”

The plot is mostly there to get them to their destination: stuck on a mountain after taking an ill-advised shortcut. Tempers flare, secrets get divulged and violence starts to erupt. Meanwhile, Alison is getting progressively sicker, exhibiting the same symptoms discussed on a pamphlet about Stoughton Valley Witch Trials they lifted from a gas station. As their situation gets more dire, they predictably turn on each and do stupid things to make their situation worse.

I hated these characters. And I hated them not in the good way, like in the aforementioned Harpoon. New girlfriend Bree sums it up best when she says, “Your friends are really fucked up.” Bitchiness aside (or maybe because of that trait?), she was the most interesting character. The only one who actually had, well, character. And she’s rendered mute and catatonic through most of the film. Jill, our heroine, is as milquetoast as her name would suggest and her relationship with Derek seems improbable given their two extremes. He’s a dick from the very beginning, threatening to throw out her expensive textbook and resorting to name calling from the opening minute.

The problem is that we don’t see the characters slowly devolve into infighting…they’re mean-spirited, misogynistic and racist from the very beginning. There’s no character growth…or in this case, character descent…because they start as evil as they end.

Technically, it’s a well-shot indie film. The environments captured by cinematographer Martin Wojtunik are so cold you can feel it through the screen and the performances captured by director Jordan Barker are decent, if two-dimensional. While the film is full of varying shades of gray, the relatively contained location works well as a tension-builder. One particular moment of seeing simply a shadow moving along the ice-covered windows is especially effective. Additionally, while gore is used mostly sparingly, it still shocks with a couple well-timed moments of violence and some decent practical effects.

It’s just that I don’t care about the two dimensional characters or...literally anything happening on screen. The filmmakers want to create their own modern day witch hunt as all of the events start to get blamed on the sick Alison. She has the motive because of the video taken of her and also the potentially supernatural abilities documented in the original witch hunt texts. Witches in the Woods obviously wants to explore the way people as easily fall into mob mentality today as during the witch hunts. Unfortunately, the path to that point is very muddled and then, when it finally does get to it, it’s the only thing it hammers for the rest of the run time. Too much of the movie is wasted on insufferable characters that squash any attempt at a deeper meaning.

It’s unfortunate because this was one of the movies I was most looking forward to, from this festival.