THE BANISHED - Mark Reviews Movies

The Banished, Brainstorm Media

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 17, 2025

Writer/director Joseph Sims-Dennett's The Banished doesn't seem interested in building tension. Instead, the movie attempts to force it upon us.

The effort mostly comes from the back-and-forth structure of this narrative, which initially puts us into the tale of a young woman lost in the woods. She's Grace (Meg Clarke), who awakens in her tent one morning to discover that her camping partner is not inside his tent. It's a fine-enough start for a mystery and a thriller, but this introductory flash-forward is just the start of a story that doesn't trust its ability to, well, tell the story it wants to.

From there, Sims-Dennett—who also co-edited the movie with two others (Andrew Bennett and co-star Leighton Cardno), which comes as a legitimate shock to learn, given how little momentum the movie possesses and how unintelligibly certain scenes are stitched together—keeps up the to-and-fro gimmick. Basically, the first two acts of the plot are mashed together with little consideration for setup, payoff, or even giving us the basics of the story and characters before we're supposed to be invested in them.

Eventually, we learn that Grace's father has died, which brings her back to her hometown after she left years ago. We also gradually discover that the woman has a brother, who has apparently disappeared after being exiled from a religious community, living on the street, and falling into drug addiction. Grace decides to go looking for her brother, although an uncle (played by Tony Hughes) and everyone else in town are mostly unhelpful in offering up information. There's a string of people who have gone missing in recent years, including the uncle's wife, and no one wants to talk about what might have happened to them.

That's technically the first act of Sims-Dennett's story, but there's a rather confounding thing about the way the movie plays it. Those scenes are scattered throughout the tale's second act, which has Grace wandering the forest alone, trying to find her hiking partner, receiving calls from a fellow lost backpacker over a walkie-talkie, and hearing footfalls and seeing suspicious things in the night.

The missing partner, by the way, is Mr. Green (Cardno), a man so elusive that he's doubly absent in this movie—both in that his apparent disappearance is the starting point of the movie and in that, because of the structure, his actual introduction within the movie doesn't actually occur for quite some time. It's tough to care or worry about the fate of a guy who essentially doesn't exist.

What was the thinking behind this way of telling this story? It seems one born of impatience, with the filmmakers possessing it and also assuming it of the audience. This is, ultimately, a horror movie, in that there is something or someone or some things or people in the forest. When he finally arrives, Mr. Green explains that he and others have been transporting those on the fringes of society to a commune in the woods, so Grace assumes that must be where her brother is and that Mr. Green must be trustworthy.

She's a naïve sort, which is a surprise, considering what's revealed about her recently deceased father, his abuses at home and presumably within the local religious community, and how strangely enigmatic everyone is about something as serious as dozens of people disappearing without a trace. Surely, all of this must define our protagonist and add an air of uncertainty to the story, but since the exposition arrives so late and most of the plot is in motion before we learn anything about those background details and the stakes, neither the character nor the reason for the plot really matters.

The impatience, then, is how the filmmakers just want to cut to the chase, because that, in their minds, is the important part of a horror story and what the audience is going to expect from it. The fault, though, is that there's also no buildup to the game in the woods. It simply happens, and we're expected to be invested in Grace, her search for her brother and Mr. Green, and what or who is in the forest with her, even though the movie itself doesn't establish any of that until later.

Some other elements of The Banished don't help, either, such as Grace trying to hide while wearing a bright yellow coat or how, in one climactic moment, she seems to be injured by the violent, incoherent cuts of the editing. To be fair, the third act, in which the truth and its consequences are revealed, is at least superficially unsettling. It's a wonder what a storyteller actually providing the proper context to a story can do, huh?

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