Devil’s Pass

AKA: The Dyatlov Pass Incident

A group of five American college students set off to Russia to do a documentary that’s meant to investigate the mystery surrounding the Dyatlov Pass Incident from 1959, retracing the steps of the nine doomed mountain climbers. Everything’s going fine until they get halfway up the mountain and odd things start to happen. They hear strange noises, find random footprints in the snow with no start nor ending point, and some of their equipment starts to go haywire. Not wanting to be deterred after having come so far, they press on to the Dyatlov’s original campsite to spend the night. But as morning comes they realize too late that they may have retraced the doomed party’s footsteps just a little too closely.

Full disclosure: I have never understood the compulsion to do this.

Devil’s Pass is a found-footage style, UK/Russian co-production from 2013. The closest comparison I can think of to give you an idea of what kind of film this is would be The Blair Witch Project, just with better camera work. This means two things. First, is that the camera is stabilized 99.9% of the time, so this isn’t your typical “shaky cam” mockumentary that constantly threatens to give you motion sickness. In fact, the camera work is often so good, and so smooth, that at times you may completely forget that you’re even watching a “found footage” film. So that’s a nice change of pace. The second thing is that, much like The Blair Witch Project, you don’t actually learn all that much about what the film claims to be about, which in this case is discovering what happened to the Dyatlov Pass hikers. Despite being the movie’s whole premise, it doesn’t even come close to answering that question. Instead, the film focuses on what happens to the silly, unprepared American hikers and all the weird crap they go through on their journey. Dyatlov and company be damned.

Yeah, cause this isn’t creepy at all…

For those who don’t know, the Dyatlov Incident refers to an event in 1959 when 9 Soviet hikers died in the Ural Mountains under mysterious circumstances. For reasons unknown, the 9 hikers all fled their camp one night, in various states of dress, having cut through their tent from the inside out. Two were found near a treeline with the remnants of a fire, clad only in their underwear. Three more were found in positions suggesting that they were trying to return to the tent. The remaining four were further down the mountain in a ravine. These four were better dressed, with signs that they may have taken clothes from the deceased. Three of those in the ravine had fatal injuries, one with major skull damage, and two with major chest fractures, yet no external wounds to correspond to their bone fractures.

The main mystery surrounding the incident centers mostly around why the hikers left their tent in the way they did, as there was no evidence of any external threat. There were no signs of some kind of attack, or even an avalanche, and the footprints found leading away from the tent suggested a relatively calm exit by all of the hikers. Theories abound as to the cause, from everything from aliens to katabatic wind. But a study from 2020 suggests that merely the threat of an avalanche would have been enough to make the hikers flee. Though the conditions of the area were not feasible to cause an avalanche, the extreme conditions in the Pass at the time, including sub-zero temperatures and hurricane force winds, would have created audible sounds of cracking ice, suggesting an imminent avalanche. Accordingly, the experienced hikers then followed proper procedure: they evacuated, took shelter in the woods, built a fire, made an ice cave, etc. But because it was the middle of the night, and the conditions were so poor, they had no supplies, and subsequently froze and/or fell into that ravine.

After being forced to look all this crap up and inevitably falling down the proverbial internet rabbit hole regarding the wild conspiracy theories surrounding this particular incident, I can confirm that despite supposedly being what the movie is based around, Devil’s Pass actually touches on only a fraction of anything surrounding the Dyatlov Incident. For every fact it gets right, it glosses over three more things, or just outright gets stuff wrong. For instance, it sneaks in at least a dozen suggested conspiracy theories (UFOs! Yetis! The government did it!) and even mentions the report of strange orange orbs floating in the sky around the vicinity of the Pass near the time of the incident, and yet at the same time it leaves out a lot of the strange discrepancies surrounding the state of the victims (like missing eyes and a tongue) and even mispronounces the names of some of the hikers. Which, you know, I guess you could blame that last one on dumb old Americans not being able to pronounce Russian. But what really makes that last bit sad is that this was a Russian co-production. Like, there were lots of Russians and Ukrainians involved in the making of this film based on a real life incident, including three producers, and I am shocked that no one at some point stopped and went, “Um, could we maybe try to get the names right?” To me that, at least, seems like a low bar to meet.

This is the “skeptic” of the group. Can you tell?

But despite that and other rather small, but still present and aggravating annoyances that you fully expect to see in “found footage” films like this, the movie surprisingly starts off very well. Turns out, when you’re not forced to watch “shaky cam” these mock-u-horrors actually do feel much more like documentaries. Granted, it’s the kind that’s also cringy and in desperate need of a pair of editing scissors, but it doesn’t go out of its way to try to make me nauseous, so it could be worse. Plus, the movie was actually filmed in Russia on an honest-to-god mountain, so the movie has some of the nicest scenery you will ever see. And though Devil’s Pass is decidedly a slow-burn type of film until the film’s climax in the last 25 minutes or so, it paces itself well by slowly dropping information and hints about what’s going on, and slowly building up the tension.

Well, it’s nice if you like snowy mountain scenery, anyway.

Unfortunately the film’s real problem arises in those last aforementioned 25 minutes. Because the film’s biggest problem isn’t the buildup, but the ending. And let me tell you it’s… It’s not good. I’m honestly not sure what they were thinking by going in the direction that they did. At some point during the film, after they initially find the vanishing footprints, one of the characters jokingly suggests the culprit is a flying Yeti. And you know what, I chuckled when they said that, because yeah, that’s dumb. But now, after having seen what they settled on instead, I think I would have preferred the ridiculous flying cryptid. Because the ending they gave us just ends up feeling like they had too many choices to choose from and couldn’t narrow it down, so they threw a couple of the existing theories together, made up some of their own, and then tossed them all in a pot to simmer into an unflattering pile of goop. And while I won’t say what they did, just in case anyone actually wants to watch it, I will say that it’s just some ungodly amalgamation of supernatural, sci-fi, and monster, all rolled up into a very convoluted government conspiracy, and it’s just… It ends up being way, way too much. Quite frankly, it’s just obnoxiously overly complicated for a movie like this. It’s so ridiculous that in other circumstances I might suspect that their “kitchen sink” ending was the result of some kind of last minute meddling, but in this case it’s not. You’re actually given hints of the ending during the rest of the movie, so the dump of bizarre choices at the end were all completely intentional from the get-go. Then, to make matters worse, once the movie is over and you get over the shock, you realize that the movie never bothered to explain what happened to the original hikers. Oh, the ending certainly suggests what might have happened to them. But the more you try to think about it, the more convoluted the possibilities become, so I’m here to tell you right now that it’s best not to try, lest you run the risk of accidentally short circuiting your brain and hurting yourself.

Oh, for f*&^% sake!

Devil’s Pass is the type of movie that starts off with promise, but then shoots itself in the foot at the end. Yeah, it’s a found footage film, so that’s already going to turn a lot of people off, and the movie comes with the expected drawbacks associated with such films, like crumby/cringe inducing dialogue and painfully dull characters that you won’t care about unless perhaps they croak in some spectacularly gruesome fashion. But for a found footage film, it’s not that bad… At least up until the ending. For the most part the film looks good, it sounds good, the tension builds nicely throughout, and though the characters are dull, they’re not gratingly annoying. So it’s kind of a let down when the ending ends up…being what it is. Oh, it’s interesting and semi-entertaining in a “WTF is this” kind of way. But it’s also the type of ending that feels needlessly elaborate for the type of film it’s in. I think I really would have preferred the winged Yeti hell-beast, but alas. But hey, if you don’t mind slow-burn films and you’re not the type to be annoyed by random weird endings, or you can at least turn your brain off long enough not to be bothered by them, then Devil’s Pass ain’t a bad film for its genre. But if that’s not you then…well, at the very least, you’ll have some very nice mountain ranges to look at.

Devil’s Pass is available on a variety of streaming services.

Devil’s Pass is also available on DVD and Bluray.

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