REVIEW | Lisa Fremont
- Director: Gloria Mercer
- Writer: Aidan West
- Stars: Bethany Brown, Cody Kearsley, Henry Mah, Chris McNally, Tandia Mercedes
For the horror/thriller crowd, the debate of whether a woman is safer in the woods with a man or a bear is an especially difficult question to answer. Sure, there are a million and one slasher films set in the woods, but there is also a healthy amount of movies about bears attacking people. What about the woman in the scenario? What if she’s really the one we need to worry about?
Screening at Fantasia 2026, A Safe Distance is a thriller about two women who find themselves in the woods with decidedly less than stellar men and instead of waiting for a bear to come along and take out the trash, they do it themselves.
We meet Alex and Kianna while they are burying a body, but in order to find out who the deceased in question is, we need to go back a few days to when Alex and her boyfriend Joey embark on a camping trip to celebrate their 8-year anniversary. A series of events, both big and small, each showcasing the vast differences between men and women, culminate in Joey (Chris McNally) abandoning Alex (Bethany Brown) in the woods. As she begins her journey out of the forest, she runs into Kianna and Matt and this serendipitous moment will prove lifechanging for everyone involved.
Kianna (Tandia Mercedes) and Matt (Cody Kearsley) are living out of their van, traveling at their leisure and indulging in the kind of carefree, jobless, hippie-dippie life that seems fiscally impossible, yet people seem to swing it. Alex easily joins their two-person dynamic and the chill, stress-free vibe that Kianna and Matt exude feels intoxicating to Alex, a woman who feels trapped in her job, trapped in her relationship, and trapped in the life she has chosen.
Director Gloria Mercer is great with letting a moment linger just a bit too long or subtly utilizing the background to illustrate that Matt is not the forward, feminist thinker that he purports to be. As Alex and Kianna grow closer, Matt’s barely disguised misogyny begins to surface in unpredictable and, sometimes, violent ways.
Ultimately, the real standout in A Safe Distance is Aidan West’s screenplay. On the surface, this plays like a run-of-the-mill sapphic thriller, but West peels away the layers of performative feminism to reveal the privileged, meme-spouting men that both Joey and Matt really are. There is a conversation around the campfire that is so sly and smart, the man in question has absolutely no idea that while he is claiming to be a feminist, he’s also being told, point-blank, what’s about to happen to him. Brown and Mercedes deliver such measured, quiet performances, speaking more with their eyes and bodies than their mouths, and McNally and Kearsley are weaponized incompetence personified. In the wrong hands, all of this could have easily been a self-indulgent, preachy lesson on gender politics, but Mercer has masterfully crafted a very real and intimate thriller that captures the volatile gender dynamics we’re all currently navigating, while also showcasing the power of female relationships.
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