Written by Charlie Robb and co-directed by Robb and Douglas Tawn, the 2025 Loner is a found-footage folk horror film about a man called Angus (played by Robb) who heads out into the Northumbrian woods to vlog about “living off the land” – totally cut off from the modern world (no wi-fi, for instance). It should be noted, though, that the cabin he’s renting, advertised as an “Anonymous Retreat,” has plenty of mod cons, and he’s not exactly roughing it. That’s probably a good thing, as Angus’s efforts to film himself “living off the land” turn out to be rather comically incompetent, such as when he attempts to instruct his viewers on how to build a wilderness shelter (which isn’t a shelter) and in which he then gets hopelessly trapped.
Nature isn’t the worst of Angus’s problems, however, as he encounters increasingly strange and disturbing things. On his way into the woods, he runs across what seems to be a buried Celtic marker and a strange white rock. But then later, while he’s recording ambient forest sound, he hears a grunting and someone sobbing and whimpering. That night, a woman whom he had passed in the forest on his trek in bangs on the door of his cabin begging to be let in, screaming that she’s in danger. Angus won’t let her in – too terrified to help her, even though the woman – Eve (Kat Johns-Burke) – does not seem at all threatening. This isn’t a choice you usually see characters make in films, but Angus’s character has been developed enough at this point in the film that the choice seems believable, true to him.
Check out the trailer for Loner here:
At this point, the inexplicable occurrences escalate: Angus tries to leave, walking for hours in the forest but never able to find the road where he parked his car; when he returns, his cabin is ransacked and his food and then his boots are taken; he hears something moving on his cabin roof; he tries to walk to a lake, taking the same route he took before, but it “isn’t there.”
What I’ve said about Loner so far would make you think that it’s a lot like that ur-film of the lost-in-the-woods found-footage subgenre, The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) – and it is. Like Heather, Mike and Josh, Angus goes into the woods to make a film; like them, he is grossly under-prepared; like them, he hears strange noises in the woods, especially at night, and begins to feel he’s being “hunted” by something; like them, he tries to leave and can’t, becomingly hopelessly lost. There’s even a “confessional” in the last part of Loner that clearly evokes Heather’s famous teary apology on camera near the end of Blair Witch.
There are, though, important differences that I think make Loner a really interesting and distinctive entry in the lost-in-the-woods found-footage canon. First and foremost, Angus is revealed to be a profoundly unreliable narrator in ways I haven’t quite seen before. Not wanting to give away spoilers here (see below!), I’ll just say that Angus’s character becomes more complicated as the film goes along. You think you know him, but you don’t. As more and more is revealed about Angus’s character, the film’s chronology also becomes more complex, as we learn parts of the film were omitted, only to be shown later.
Angus finds a book of Northumbrian folklore
Loner also leans into the local history and folklore of Northumbria. The woman Angus encounters – Eve – says she’s a student, and she’s carrying a book, A Folk History of Northumbria, that Angus discovers and reads. It includes information about Northumbria’s early Celtic past and the veneration of “pagan deities.” Angus comes to believe he’s encountered such a pagan deity in the forest – and the book offers the foreboding information that the entity might well “consume” its victims whole, leaving no trace and seeing them “redistributed to the natural surroundings.” Angus takes a trip to the British Museum in London late in the film that adds an intriguing layer of authenticity to these folkloric stories.
Loner is an excellent entry in the found-footage and folk horror canons, and I highly recommend it to fans of both. Angus is a well-acted character, who moves from comic to a whole lot more than what we think at first, taking the film into unexpected places. The film expertly weaves psychological horror and folk horror, leaving us wondering how much of what we’ve seen is in fact due to the “ancient force” that stalks the Northumbria forest and how much is about Angus’s increasing psychological breakdown. The pacing of the film and the cinematography are all great, making for a continuously tense and surprising viewing experience. And it’s filmed on location in Northumberland, including at McCartney’s Cave, near Rothbury – where crucial scenes possibly involving the Celtic deity are filmed.
McCartneys Cave near Rothbury, Northumberland
**SPOILERS**
Here are my thoughts on the ending of Loner – and what I think it means (one of the things it means, anyway).
Loner’s big reveal is that Angus not only refused to let Eve into his cabin when she begged for help, but that he later kills her – accidentally impaling her with his sharpened stick when he’s running through the forest at night. The viewer doesn’t find this out until the very end of the film – and it appears Angus keeps it from the viewer, not talking about it on camera, just as he, more blatantly, lies to the camera about the death of his partner and the absence in his life of his parents. (The film inevitably raises the question, though: does he? Angus sends the video to his friend, so it’s unclear how much of the editing of the film is down to Angus or his friend.)
However, Angus does seem to be redeemed, despite his cowardice and his killing of Eve. Or, at least, he tries to redeem himself. Near the end of Loner, he manages to get out of the forest and get home. He then takes a trip to the British Museum that seems to be about verifying that he may in fact have had an encounter with a Celtic deity. (He matches an artifact he found in the woods with those in the museum.) He then goes back to the woods with the clear intent of sacrificing himself – the end result of a kind of intensifying self-hatred he exhibits throughout the film: “I’m a stupid fucking lazy waste of space,” he tells the camera in his “confessional” moment. It’s actually really hard to watch this film and not feel sympathy for Angus, despite all his weaknesses and flaws (or, maybe, in the end, because of them).
It may be a stretch to read this film allegorically, but it does seem somewhat of a commentary on the crisis among Gen Z men, on their increasing isolation (their relationship primarily with screens) and their difficulty (compared to previous generations) finding their way in the world. Angus seems to have virtually no connections: his purported prior relationship with Katie seems a complete fiction (she’s a neighbor who doesn’t seem to have much time for him) and he’s lost touch with all his friends.
The folklore Angus encounters out in the Northumbrian woods (as much as he seems to make fun of it at first) actually does seem to offer Angus the only shred of meaning he’s managed to find in his life – and he grabs it. He sacrifices himself, perhaps with the hope of being “redistributed” for the benefit of others, of nature.
In this, Loner seems somewhat of a commentary on folk horror. The film may, at first, poke fun at Angus for thinking he’s going to find himself in the woods. But, in the end, Angus does find meaning in the woods, and in the deep folklore of the place. Both do give his life a kind of meaning it never had before. Perhaps Loner thus offers up one reason for the continuing popularity of folk horror as a genre.
