In one of his most famous routines, comedian John Mulaney muses, “I always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be.” There was a time, of course, when quicksand was a go-to peril in popular culture, particularly in the realm of the jungle adventure story. Those narratives have since gone out of favor as we continue to reckon with the ghosts of colonialism, but quicksand remains a ubiquitous presence in cartoons and video games; like milkmen or Edward G. Robinson, the sinky substance has persisted as part of our collective unconscious through decades of second- and third-hand references and homage. Perhaps there’s something universal about the fear that we can’t trust the very ground we stand on. Or maybe it’s just fun to watch explorers get swallowed up as they grasp for conveniently placed vines.
So elemental is our fear of quicksand that the single word provides the latest Shudder original with both its title and its basic plot synopsis. In Quicksand, married couple Sofia and Josh (Carolina Gaitan and Allan Hawco) arrive in Sofia’s native Colombia to each deliver a lecture at a medical conference. We can tell from their chilly ride to the hotel, however, that not all is well between them; as Josh later confides to a mutual friend, the pair have been living separately for months and are in the process of a not particularly amicable divorce. Still, they’ve got a day to kill, and they are in Colombia, so the couple decide to put aside their differences and take a hike together through the wilderness. I really shouldn’t have to tell you that things go awry; sure enough, following a run-in with an unsavory local, Sofia and Josh find themselves up to their necks in the titular sediment, and realize they need to put aside their differences if their feet ever want to touch solid ground again.
It’s easy to see the appeal in centering a low-budget horror movie entirely around a pit of quicksand; all you need is a patch of mud and a couple of actors who don’t mind getting grubby and you’re good to go. But it becomes apparent just a few minutes into this film why quicksand is generally used as an incident in a larger journey. On its own, quicksand is not a terribly cinematic adversary, especially when it needs to work slowly enough to last an entire movie. From the end of the first act onward, our heroes barely move a muscle. Though they narrate their attempts to escape (“I’m going to try to move my foot!” “I just felt something move!”), all we can see are their muddy faces in standard shot-reverse-shot framing. It’s easy to empathize with the couple’s plight– again, sinking in quicksand is one of those things that we’ve improbably all contemplated at one point or another– but after an hour or so of being stuck there with them it’s hard not to get fidgety.
A film with so little action naturally relies on its dialogue and characters, which is where Quicksand runs into its other big hurtle. Quicksand has the misfortune of being released just four years after Ari Aster’s Midsommar, which roughly did for break-up horror what King Kong did for giant ape pictures. By contrast to that film, which brings the conscious uncoupling of its characters to an operatic level nearly as terrifying as its bloodthirsty pagan death cult, the divorce at the center of Quicksand feels flat and impersonal. While Hawco and Gaitan sell the bitterness of the just-barely-on-speaking-terms divorce, there’s little insight as to why these two characters fell out of love; there are lines here and there about his drinking or her stifled ambitions, but there is no specificity to their differences. For a couple essentially Parent Trapped together, they don’t dig terribly deeply into their struggles; like so many movie couples, they seem to be divorcing on grounds of “it’s in the script.”
If it seems like I’m bagging on Quicksand, I want to make clear that it’s not a bad film, necessarily. As a rule, productions from horror boutique platform Shudder are a cut above the average streaming original, and Quicksand certainly feels more like the product of a human writer than the latest Netflix “blockbuster.” Its central performances are solid, particularly Gaitan, who seems like she’s ready to pop out of her skin even before she’s placed in a life-or-death situation*. And while the characters are perhaps thinner than they might be, I can’t say I wasn’t invested in their plight by the end. All of this is to say, if you’re looking for a decently gripping way to pass an hour and a half on your Roku, you could certainly do worse.
But you could do better, too (particularly if you do have Shudder, which has given us such nifty originals as Host and Scare Me and the latter-day V/H/S films). As a grounded portrait of a marriage on the rocks, it’s simply too preposterous to be taken seriously; the entire movie could have been avoided if our heroes were smart enough to hop in their car instead of flee into the woods, and a major plot point involves an ostensibly deadly bite from what is to my eyes a non-venomous python. At the same time, it’s too dour and static to provide the over-the-top thrills you want from a movie called Quicksand. Like its characters, Quicksand is stuck in the middle, and it never quite figures out how to free itself from the mire.
* – Praising as I am the writing and acting in a made-for-streaming production, this seems like a good moment to say: solidarity.
Quicksand
2023
dir. Andres Beltran
86 min.
Streaming Friday, 7/14 on Shudder
