Skip to main content

Slash/Back review: The kids are all right (especially when fighting aliens)

Audiences love stories that pit plucky kids against horrible monsters — whether it’s aliens, zombies, ghosts, or various other supernatural threats. There’s so much love for these stories, in fact, that it takes a special kind of film to stand out in the crowded “kids vs. monsters” genre these days.

Director Nyla Innuksuk’s Slash/Back is one such film, and it delivers a uniquely clever, creepy-fun adventure, led by a talented cast of young actors.

Two girls, one holding a rifle, crouch in a field in a scene from Slash/Back.

Rough but real

The first feature-length film from Innuksuk, Slash/Back is set and shot in the Inuit hamlet of Pangnirtung in Nunavut, Canada. The film follows a group of young girls, played by Tasiana Shirley, Alexis Wolfe, Nalajoss Ellsworth, and Chelsea Prusky, who discover a deadly alien creature threatening their tiny, remote community. They take it upon themselves to stop the extraterrestrial invader with a mix of makeshift weapons, horror-movie savvy, and the skills they’ve learned growing up in the place they call “Pang.”

Nearly the entire cast of Slash/Back was recruited from Pangnirtung and the surrounding regions of Nunavut, and although their lack of acting experience is evident in the film, Innuksuk smartly weaves that quality into the energy of the film. The main characters act and talk like the kids they are, frequently lamenting the boredom of life in Pang and discussing their respective local crushes, usually while staring at a phone screen. The casualness of the actors’ approach adds a sense of authenticity to the adventure Innuksuk crafts around them, and even gives the film a documentary-like vibe at times, particularly in those moments when the alien-fighting kids are simply being, well … kids.

When the action picks up, the girls handle the frantic moments even more comfortably, delivering some fun performances as the self-appointed — and in some cases, reluctant — defenders of their village. The actors throw themselves into both the scares and campiness of it all with an entertaining blend of dramatic (and sometimes amusingly overdramatic) sincerity and standard-issue teenage apathy.

Three girls, each armed with different weapons, go looking for alien invaders in a scene from Slash/Back.

Smart sourcing

In the easiest comparisons to make with Slash/Back, the film delivers a mash-up of Joe Cornish’s 2011, London-set alien invasion film Attack the Block and John Carpenter’s iconic, 1982 polar thriller The Thing.

Like Attack the Block, Innuksuk’s film puts the fate of a community that doesn’t seem outwardly united into the hands of the most unlikely of saviors. And much like the adolescent gang in Cornish’s film does, the kids of Slash/Back could not seemingly care less about their little village. However, when circumstances (or more accurately, deadly alien invaders) force them to reckon with their real feelings about their neighbors, a subconscious switch is flipped that gives them a powerful sense of purpose and allegiance to the community they once seemed desperate to leave.

That evolution is particularly fun to watch with the young cast of Slash/Back, whose rough-around-the-edges acting makes the characters’ pivot from angsty teenagers to alien-vanquishing heroes feel a little more honest, as the roles they play never feel that far distanced from their reality.

One of the aliens wearing a skin suit stares at the camera in a scene from Slash/Back.

Slash/Back also takes plenty of cues from The Thing in the sense of isolation its remote setting and Innuksuk’s camera create, as well as some of the film’s creature designs, which involve piles of slimy tentacles and gruesome practical effects. The film’s extraterrestrial monsters wear the skin of their victims — both human and animal — as they invade Pang, and the film is at its best when it’s leaning into the work done by contortionists and clever costuming to give the film’s creatures a terrifying, physical presence in the kids’ world.

Unfortunately, that gritty, ’80s horror aesthetic of the aliens takes a bit of a hit when the film relies too heavily on digital effects, as those elements often feel a bit too polished and sharp for the world around them.

A girl wearing face paint looks off-camera in a scene from Slash/Back.

People and place

Innuksuk also makes excellent use of sound in Slash/Back, relying almost entirely on traditional music and Indigenous musicians to establish the film’s sense of place and culture. In one particularly effective example, elements of traditional Inuit throat-singing are layered over several tense moments, and the pairing elevates a creepy scene to something far more chilling, all while deepening the story’s connection to its setting.

Innuksuk also manages to embed plenty of sociopolitical themes in Slash/Back that take it beyond a simple creature feature, offering a more well-rounded experience for anyone looking for more out of it. As its “kids vs. monsters” saga plays out, the story touches on the relationship between different generations of Indigenous peoples and their culture and traditions, wealth disparity within remote communities like Pang, and these communities’ connection to the rest of the world, among other heady topics that are addressed with an impressively subtle touch.

With Slash/Back, audiences willing to look past the film’s no-frills approach to filmmaking will find a rich, wonderfully textured story rooted in the place and people of its setting. They’ll also find an amazingly fun, funny — and yes, genuinely creepy at times — horror film about plucky kids battling terrifying alien tentacle monsters from space.

That’s the sort of double feature you don’t get from every scary movie out there, and it’s what makes Slash/Back something truly special.

Directed by Nyla Innuksuk, Slash/Back will be available October 21 in theaters and via on-demand video.

Slash/Back (2022)
Slash/Back
71 %
5.6/10
87m
Genre Science Fiction, Action, Thriller, Horror
Stars Tasiana Shirley, Alexis Wolfe, Nalajoss Ellsworth
Directed by Nyla Innuksuk

Editors' Recommendations

Movie images and data from:
Rick Marshall
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
Pearl review: a star is born (and is very, very bloody)
Mia Goth stares at the camera in the poster for Pearl.

Pearl is a candy-coated piece of rotten fruit. The film, which is director Ti West’s prequel to this year's X, trades in the desaturated look and 1970s seediness of its parent film for a lurid, Douglas Sirk-inspired aesthetic that seems, at first, to exist incongruently with its story of intense violence and horror. But much like its titular protagonist, whose youthful beauty and Southern lilt masks the monster within, there’s a poison lurking beneath Pearl’s vibrant colors and seemingly untarnished Depression-era America setting.

Set around 60 years before X, West’s new prequel does away with the por nstars, abandoned farms, and eerie old folks that made its predecessor’s horror influences clear and replaces them with poor farmers, charming film projectionists, and young women with big dreams. Despite those differences, Pearl still feels like a natural follow-up to X. The latter film, with its use of split screens and well-placed needle drops, offered a surprisingly dark rumination on the horror of old age. Pearl, meanwhile, explores the loss of innocence and, in specific, the often terrifying truths that remain after one’s dreams have been unceremoniously ripped away from them.

Read more
Glass Onion review: a deviously intricate Knives Out sequel
Daniel Craig looks in the camera in Knives Out 2.

Like the drawling Southern detective he has now placed at the center of two fabulously entertaining clockwork whodunits, Rian Johnson should not be underestimated. The writer, director, and blockbuster puzzle enthusiast has a gift for luring his audience onto ornately patterned rugs, then giving their edges a powerful yank. Glass Onion at first seems like a more straightforward, less elegant act of Agatha Christie homage than its predecessor, the murder-mystery sleeper Knives Out. But to assume you’ve gotten ahead of it, or seen every nature of trick Johnson has concealed under his sleeve, is to fall into the same trap as the potential culprits who dare trifle with the great Benoit Blanc (a joyfully re-invested Daniel Craig).

Anyone annoyed by the topical culture-war trappings of Knives Out (all that background MAGA chatter and drawing-room conversation on immigration policy) may be irked anew by how Glass Onion situates itself rather explicitly at the onset of COVID, with an opening series of introductions heavy on face wear and video chats. Even Johnson, first-rate showman that he is, can’t make these reminders of the recent, dismal past very funny.

Read more
Speak No Evil review: the horror of holding your tongue
Morten Burian and Sidsel Siem Koch scream inside a car.

Horror movies, even the very good ones, have a way of turning their audiences into backseat survivors: “Get out of the house already!” we scream at characters too stubborn or stupid to acknowledge the warning signs around them. It can be part of the communal fun of the genre, pleading aloud for the people on screen to get in touch with their self-preservation instincts.

Viewers will likely have some choice words (or maybe just groans) for the slow-to-flee characters of Speak No Evil. Here, the imperiled — a Danish family enduring a nightmare weekend in the Dutch boonies — actually do make the decision to get the hell out of dodge. Alas, they only go a couple of miles down the road before putting the car in reverse, their escape aborted upon the discovery that a beloved toy has been left behind. What’s more exasperating than someone refusing to get out of the house? How about watching them get out of the house, change their mind, and step right back into it?

Read more