Cub

After a chilling prologue involving a terrified girl frantically trying to escape an unseen menace, we cut to a troop of preteen Cub Scouts and two capable twentysomething Scout Leaders (plus their cute female cook) heading into the woods for a summer camping trip. Will any of them be coming back? Twelve-year-old Sam (Maurice Luijten), a scrappy loner from an abusive family, starts investigating the whereabouts of Kai, a creature that lives in the woods—at least according to the campfire tale the scout leaders tell to scare the kids. The next morning the scouts awake to find various items have been stolen and suspicion falls on Sam. Wandering off into the woods, Sam thinks he finds proof that Kai is real, although there’s actually something far more cunning out there waiting for hapless victims to enter its forest lair—and in the time-honored tradition, nobody believes him until it’s too late. In his riveting, smart, and skillfully directed feature debut, Jonas Govaerts creates a nightmare of relentless feral horror with a truly shocking finale, and in the process goes to the head of the class among the next generation of horror directors.