This eerie B-horror is not without interest. Owing more kinship to The Twilight Zone than The Evil Dead, DAWNING pits an unknown evil in the woods against a gratingly dysfunctional family conducting an uneasy reunion in a cabin deep in the lonely Northern Minnesota wilderness.
Grown children Chris and Aurora are welcomed in by their alcoholic father, Richard, and their stepmother, Laura. At first, Gregg Holtgrewe's script pursues faltering battles for dominance between Chris and his father, who are immediately at odds, with attempts at a forced reconciliation via the stepmother who acts as a peacemaker. The tepid melodrama is suddenly overshadowed by an attack by unknown perpetrators on the family dog after it wanders into the forest at night. Just as suddenly, a bloodied, possibly insane stranger appears claiming his girlfriend was murdered by an unseen It in the forest. What follows is suspenseful if not somewhat predictable, in the rote disappearances of characters who enter the woods to investigate voices or noises beyond the tenuous safety of the familial cabin.
Holtgrewe, who also directed, compensates for the lack of visceral thrills with a steady, studied increase in thrills of the Creepy variety. Two scenes stand out as superior skin-crawlers -- Chris' discovery of his father in the woods and the final scene, in which Aurora's routine pulling back of a window curtain reveals the inexplicable in all its ghostly glory.
DAWNING is not completely satisfying and the acting is shaky -- Jonas Goslow and Najarra Townsend are adequate as the young leads but the others are rural repertory theater types, with Danny Salmen doing his eye-rolling utmost to convey crazed fear which irritates rather than illuminates. The cabin setting, shot in floods of warm yellows and wood-grain oranges, juxtaposes well against the actions of the bickering family. Other intelligent uses of light and setting heightens the sense of dread as the family's plight becomes a matter of no escape.
Holtgrewe is a new director who has nonetheless mastered some strong dramatic irony here. For example, contrasting the family blinded by its internal struggles and emotional deadness against the forest, which projects its own brand of deadness and horror, into which the humans simply wander unaware of what it is they can't see.
--Jeffrey Frentzen
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