Horrors set in remote wooded locations are nothing new. One just came out April 5. But it probably won’t ever cease to be a go-to location for the genre because while technology and modernization have made cities and towns fairly intuitive places, the woods will always be slightly mysterious and ripe for exploration, since just about anything could be hiding just up ahead.
The feature directorial debut from Karl Mueller, Mr. Jones, uses the forest setting to tell a different kind of tale, one where art and life make for an upsetting combination. It was apparently impressive enough to spark a lot of interest from Anchor Bay Films, who The Hollywood Reporter states acquired the thriller’s North American rights even before it got its April 19 debut at the Tribeca Film Festival. Mueller’s claim to fame thus far has been co-writing the decent post-apocalyptic thriller The Divide, though he also wrote the script for an occult-themed thriller coming out in October called The Devil’s Rapture, directed by Christian E. Christiansen (The Roommate).
The titular Mr. Jones is a famously reclusive artist living in the middle of the woods that mysteriously takes some of his sculptures into the woods every night. He becomes something of an obsession for two other artists, Scott (Jon Foster) and Penny (Sarah Jones), who move out into the woods to escape society and focus on their work. Mr. Jones is their only neighbor, and once they find out it’s him, they can’t stop digging into his life, until of course it becomes something that neither of them could have expected. Word around the Internet is that the final 15 minutes of the movie is an experience unto itself. That’s the kind of hype we can deal with.
