Hunting Matthew Nichols
Tara Nichols was five and a half years younger than her brother Matthew on the Hallowe’en night of 2001 when he and his best friend Jordan Reimer, both seventeen, felt they were too old to go trick or treating with the kids so went out on their own; the midnight curfew long after the rest of the family were in bed, it wasn’t until the next morning when checking with school showed them both as absent that the alarm was raised.
Despite the police search drawing in resources from across the region and extending for weeks, no trace of the boys was found, no hint they might have run away, no animosity towards the families which might indicate foul play, only the endless miles of Black Bear Forest with its ravines and cliffs plunging to the sea, the single piece of evidence the camcorder found in a deserted cabin in the woods, the teenagers keen amateur filmmakers fascinated by the local legend of Roy Mackenzie and his murderous cult.
Returning home after two decades and a lot of therapy to seek “a better answer than the one I have now” to the disappearance of her brother, Tara (Miranda MacDougall) has returned to Vancouver Island where the rate of missing persons is double the Canadian average in the company of her friends Markian and Ryan (Markian Tarasiuk and Ryan Alexander McDonald), a director and cameraman, to seek closure in Hunting Matthew Nichols, re-interviewing surviving family and witnesses.
Acknowledging the heavy debt to The Blair Witch Project, Matthew and Jordan (James Ross and Izzy Bull Bear) huge fans of that film who recreated scenes for the camera in the misty forests beyond tourist trails, Hunting Matthew Nichols is presented as documentary rather than found footage, edited and structured competently and with context given to the history of the region and the boys’ standing in the community.
Matthew and Jordan very different personalities, one an extrovert and the other an observer, with the Reimer family indigenous and their trust in the authorities coloured by generations of marginalisation, Tara discovers the police withheld information in the original investigation, wishing to avoid “Satanic panic” in the small community and the accusations which follow, her relationship with retired officer Pam Hamilton (The X-Files’ Christine Willes) damaged by the revelation and delivering irrational yet understandable ultimatums to her colleagues.
A film of how the passage of time can bring peace and acceptance, Tara is determined to tear open old wounds open in her search for the truth, Hunting Matthew Nichols undeniably a reworking of old ideas, but a proficient and well-performed one, and directed by Tarasiuk from a script co-written with Sean Harris Oliver it is atmospheric, effective and compelling as determination becomes an obsession which overrides good sense, the only misstep a mid- credits coda which adds nothing.
Hunting Matthew Nichols is streaming on Shudder now
