56 years and two days ago (or thereabouts), 9 skiers died in mysterious circumstances in the Ural mountains in western Russia. Their tents were found cut open from the inside, and most of the bodies were found in various states of undress, despite the cold. Several of the hikers were also found to have suffered fatal internal injuries, but had no signs of any external trauma that might have explained them. Eventually Soviet authorities determined that an "unknown compelling force" was responsible for the deaths, but that and several other unusual features of the incident have left people fascinated with the mystery of what has become known as The Dyatlov Pass incident ever since.
Eventually someone made a movie about it (several, actually, but this was the first "Western" movie and so the first one to be noticed), and it was called Devil's Pass (or The Dyatlov Pass Incident, just to confuse the links on this page some more).
So, five American students set out to recreate the journey of Igor Dyatlov and his fellow skiers for a documentary, and we're not even 10 minutes in when the movie goes all Blair Witch on us - they all of course disappear, and footage is released of two of the students huddled together and crying, saying they're all going to die. After that setup, the rest of the film is from the point-of-view of the students themselves, via their documentary. The five of them go to Russia, try to talk to the one survivor of the incident but get met with an Iron Curtain of silence, meet an old woman who was part of the original search party who tells them a different story from the official version, and then head off to the Pass itself. There it isn't long at all before all manner of strange things start to happen...
I mentioned The Blair Witch Project above because this movie is very Blair Witch - almost Blair Witch 2.0 - you've got your missing student filmmakers who were investigating a mysterious place; malfunctioning GPS and compass to replace "I kicked the map into the creek man!"; the inevitable buildup of tension between the hikers and the slow stalking of our characters by whatever it is out there just to name a few comparisons. On the other hand, Devil's Pass is scripted and paced a good deal better than The Blair Witch Project; you're not sitting there for most of the movie getting motion sickness from the camera moving around, then all but peeing yourself in terror at the final 15 (or laughing your head off, depending on how you found that film). In the end though it's still in the whole "Lost Chronicle/Seekers of Truth Get More Than They Bargained For" story.
There are a lot of possible explanations as to what was the cause of the Dyatlov Pass incident, both in reality and in this movie, and the latter takes a look at several of them before coming up with its own explanation (although I audibly sighed when the USS Eldridge came up, because seriously, can we make like Thunderdome and get beyond that now?). This is actually a good thing, I think, as if director Renny Harlin had taken one of the already-known possibilities, it would have both never lived up to people's expectations and likely infuriated others. So while I'm sorry to tell everyone that it wasn't Yetis (yes I know, spoiler alert), the ultimate revelation and film's ending are actually quite satisfying - something of a rarity in found footage movies.
I might be a little biased, as I've always had a fascination with forteana and Dyaltov Pass is one of the most enduring mysteries of the latter half of the 20th century, but I really quite like Devil's Pass. It does go a little silly season for a bit in the last 25 or so minutes and the self-zooming camera at the very end did annoy me a little, but this movie could have gone in many different ways and been far, far worse. As it is, it manages to play it relatively subdued and creepy, which makes it all the more enjoyable and - if you squint a lot and believe in that sort of thing - almost believable.
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