Found Footage Horror: The Land of Blue Lakes (2021) - Reviewed

Courtesy of FilmHub

The found footage horror film, like it or not, won’t go away and is here to stay given the ease, cost efficiency and profitability of the subgenre.  Alongside it, thanks to Russian producer Timur Bekmambetov, came the proliferation of the webcam subgenre which saw the likes of Unfriended and Megan is Missing sending shockwaves through the horror community.  

The latest addition to the ongoing trend and claiming to be the first of its kind from the country of Latvia is the new 2021 dark web/Pagan camping trip gone awry thriller The Land of Blue Lakes, a film which partially functions as a quasi-documentary/travelogue before gradually morphing into another iteration of The Blair Witch Project.  Think of it as a slightly more polished The Ghost from Hovrino which also saw a group of collegiate videographers tangling with Pagan cults deep in the forest.
 
Written, directed by and prominently starring first-time filmmaker Arturs Latkovskis and a small ensemble cast of four other actors, The Land of Blue Lakes follows Artur, Veronika, Alina, Vlad and Edgars (all playing themselves by the way) as they kayak their way through a thread of interconnected lakes and swamps.  Supposedly these particular lakes, which the collegiate videographers tell us during their paddling, were ground zero for Pagan ritualistic human sacrifices back in pre-Christian times.  But as the kids bore deeper into the forestry and terrain, wooden figures ala Blair Witch begin cropping up and it quickly becomes apparent something or someone is in the woods with them waiting for the right time to strike.

 
A 100% do-it-yourself production with the actors themselves handling their cameraphones, The Land of Blue Lakes thankfully avoids many of the pitfalls associated with the found footage subgenre, namely of characters doing stupid things for the sake of the horror film cliché.  We get a group of mostly competent individuals who are game for the trip and face more than a few obstacles that can’t help but generate some respect for what these kids did, wading knee deep through swampy wetlands and struggling to press on ahead through the brush.  Moreover, there’s a bit of historical fiction being worked into these proceedings as all the locations and the Stone of Sacrifice seen in the film are real with genuine Pagan history behind them, giving this tale a bit more of a realistic edge.
 
Visually the film’s digital HD cinematography looks impeccable and there’s a recurring camera trick used throughout that produces a 360-degree globe effect that is put to wonderfully disorienting use here.  Sadly, like The Blair Witch Project and most found footage fare, there’s no music, only the diegetic soundtrack of production audio which again makes the thing feel more real.  

Despite a brisk running time, most of The Land of Blue Lakes moves slowly through the marsh and riverbanks with the characters just trying to press on ahead with their planned camping trip, leaving very little room for actual scares which unfortunately come a bit late in the game.  Makeup effects of what appear to be mysterious ritualistic figures glimpsed onscreen in brief passing are generally good but again they’re seldom seen and don’t really pose a real threat until the very end.
 
Though grounded in serious history as well as making history for being the first Latvian film of its ilk, The Land of Blue Lakes unfortunately is much ado about nothing, a film that starts off with enormous promise only to end up as a quiet whimper.  A bit of a shame as the film’s existence itself is nevertheless a forward step for the industry.  For all of the Burden of Dreams-esque trudging through difficult wetlands by the actors themselves who give this their all, The Land of Blue Lakes doesn’t really go anywhere we haven’t seen before and unlike the Australian Lake Mungo it doesn’t really bring much new material to the table. 

 
Pretty to look at and at times engaging but mostly The Land of Blue Lakes is kind of an unrewarding cop out, a film with boundless possibilities stemming from its mercurial premise that ultimately doesn’t do much in the grand scheme of things.  But it was a decent enough travelogue through beautiful Latvian countryside I suppose.

--Andrew Kotwicki