Let’s get one thing out of the way, if a person you met on a dating app invites you to a remote family cabin with no neighbors and questionable cell service, the correct number of red flags is “all of them.” Horror movies have been built on worse logic, but Shadows of Willow Cabin understands that the bad idea isn’t really the location. It’s the two men who show up to it, each carrying a version of himself he built for somebody else’s benefit, hoping the woods will be private enough to finally put it down.

Joe Fria’s feature debut is a slow, talky, openly low-budget thing, and I want to be honest about that up front so you know what you’re walking into. It’s also one of the more emotionally specific queer horror films I’ve sat with lately, and by the time it found its footing I’d stopped keeping score on the rough patches. Mostly.

A getaway that was doomed before the drive up

Albert (Bryan Bellomo) is a married, closeted English teacher. Devon (John Brodsky) is a younger paramedic who has made a quiet habit of chasing married men who can’t fully have him. They connect through an app, the messages get heated, and they meet at Albert’s secluded family cabin to see what this is. Neither of them is a clean character. Albert is cheating on his wife while trying to decode a part of himself he’s spent years sitting on. Devon isn’t a wide-eyed innocent stumbling into a bad man’s orbit; he’s drawn to unavailability on purpose, and the movie knows it.

I appreciated that Fria refuses to assign the white hat and the black hat. You keep waiting for one of them to be revealed as the predator and the other as the prey, and the film just won’t hand you that comfort. They’re both a little selfish, both a little wrecked, both reaching for something real through people-pleasing reflexes that have never once served them. That’s a harder, kinder thing to write than a victim and a villain.

The chemistry is real because, apparently, it had to be

Here’s a piece of behind-the-scenes trivia that explains a lot about why this movie works the way it does. Fria has said his original two leads dropped out two weeks before the shoot, and Bellomo and Brodsky were assembled at the last minute, barely knowing each other, then shot chronologically up in Big Bear. So the awkward, fumbling, are-we-doing-this energy of the early scenes? That’s two actors genuinely figuring each other out, on camera, in order.

It cuts both ways. Some of those first exchanges are stiff, and not always in the productive “these men are nervous” sense, occasionally in the “this is an indie film and we’re finding the rhythm” sense. But once the relationship clicks, it really clicks, and you can almost watch the moment the performances relax into each other. Bellomo plays Albert as a man who’s been holding his breath for a decade and isn’t sure he’s allowed to exhale. Brodsky gives Devon a wariness underneath the flirtation, like he already knows how this ends and showed up anyway. When tenderness, desire, resentment, and plain fear start trading places between them, the back half earns a tension the opening couldn’t fake.

The cabin remembers things they’d rather it didn’t

This is where Fria does something smarter than the haunted-cabin marketing suggests. The supernatural stuff isn’t a separate track running parallel to the love story, it’s the love story’s subconscious, leaking into the room. The forest won’t let them leave. Time folds back on itself. Voices that were supposed to be long silenced start talking again. And the things that take shape are pulled straight from Albert and Devon’s specific histories: their shame, their grief, the people who taught them that what they want makes them disgusting.

The cabin does have ghosts, but the unresolved trauma got there first and clearly unpacked for a long stay. That’s the whole engine of the film, and it’s why it lands harder than the premise reads on paper. Fria doesn’t need to invent a metaphor for being haunted by the life you were told to live, because Albert and Devon have spent years rooming with the fake versions of themselves they built to survive. The movie just makes that literal and turns out the lights.

Warm light, then the kind that isn’t

David Haverty’s cinematography does a lot of quiet work here. The cabin starts out honeyed and intimate, all amber lamplight and the cozy lie of a romantic weekend, and the same spaces curdle as things go wrong, the warmth starts reading like a warning. Fria shot in chapters, shifting the color and even the geography of the cabin as the men come apart, and it gives a single cramped location more moods than it has any right to. Michael Teoli’s score and the sound design lean into the claustrophobia rather than jump-scaring you out of it; the dread mostly hums under the floorboards. The manifestations themselves are practical, hand-built effects, and you can feel the seams occasionally, but there’s a daylight sequence panning across the room where everything goes wrong at once that genuinely got me. Low budget, big swing, stuck the landing.

Where my patience ran thin

Now the part where I love a movie and still have notes. At around 114 minutes, this is longer than its story strictly needs, and the deliberate pace occasionally tips from “simmering” into “we have circled this same feeling three times now.” Fria’s dialogue is thoughtful, but it has a habit of explaining emotions that Bellomo and Brodsky’s faces, and Haverty’s lighting, already told me a scene ago. There are exchanges that could lose a third of their lines and gain power for it. And the fractured timeline, which is mostly an asset, sometimes blurs into vagueness rather than mystery. There were stretches where my uncertainty about what was real felt less like intrigue and more like I’d missed a stitch.

The verdict

Shadows of Willow Cabin is uneven, overlong, and unmistakably the work of a first-time feature director making a virtue of his limitations. It’s also sincere in a way that’s genuinely disarming, and its queerness isn’t decoration, it’s the load-bearing wall. The ending stays ambiguous, and I won’t touch it here except to say it resolves the feeling rather than the plot, which is the right call for this particular ghost story. Fria clearly understands that the scariest thing in the cabin was never going to be the cabin. Stick with the slow parts and the back half rewards you with something that aches.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Where to watch it

Following its international premiere at Grimmfest 2025, Shadows of Willow Cabin arrives on UK digital on June 29, 2026, courtesy of GrimmVision.