2025 • United Kingdom
Loner (2025) begins with an aspiring influencer, a free cabin in the Northumbrian woods and the sort of confidence usually associated with people who have packed a coffee grinder for the wilderness. What follows is part found-footage horror, part comedy of incompetence and part psychological collapse, with Charlie Robb carrying the film almost single-handedly as writer, director and star.
For FolknHell, the real fun begins when the film refuses to say whether Angus is being hunted by something ancient or merely building a better story around his own ruin.
Angus is a struggling vlogger who wins a remote woodland retreat and heads north hoping to turn the trip into content. He films himself settling into the cabin, performing wilderness competence and quietly revealing how much of his online life is performance.
Then possessions disappear, strange objects appear in the woods, unsettling noises gather around the cabin and a blood-covered woman named Eve arrives asking for help. As Angus becomes increasingly frightened and unreliable, the line between supernatural threat, psychological breakdown and self-authored fiction starts to collapse.
Not quite, at least not in the straightforward sense.
The film has two of FolknHell’s strongest folk horror ingredients. The Northumbrian woods matter enormously, and Angus is very clearly an outsider entering a place whose rules he does not understand. The weaker element is belief. The forest deity, Celtic references and folklore book provide a possible supernatural system, but the film also gives us good reason to suspect Angus may be using that material to explain, disguise or reshape what has happened.
That makes Loner more interesting as meta folk horror: a film about somebody building a folk horror narrative around himself. Dave Houghton was the least persuaded by the folklore evidence, while the discussion eventually pushed Andy towards a much more enthusiastic reading of the film as deliberately self-aware folk horror about folk horror.
- The performed self: Angus does not merely lie to his audience. He gradually appears to have built an entire version of himself that he needs to believe. - Isolation and male mental health: The retreat strips away the social performance and leaves Angus confronting loneliness, fear and a life that does not resemble the one he presents online. - The landscape as pressure: The woods repeatedly disorientate Angus, remove his sense of control and become more than decorative scenery. - Folklore as truth or excuse: The deity can be read as a genuine supernatural presence, but the folklore may also be Angus’s way of explaining his actions to himself. - Modern incompetence in old spaces: Coffee grinders, Wi-Fi expectations and fake survival skills become both comedy and character evidence. - Storytelling and unreliable images: Found footage is not just the film’s format. It is the point. Angus is constantly deciding what the camera should make true.
Loner is rough around the edges, underpowered as a scare machine and not always as clear as its ideas deserve. It is also funny, peculiar and increasingly rewarding once you start arguing with it.
Charlie Robb’s performance holds the whole enterprise together, especially as Angus shifts from irritating poseur to frightened, damaged and strangely sympathetic figure. Viewers wanting clean mythology or relentless tension may find it frustrating. Viewers who like unreliable narrators, ambiguous endings and horror films that become better during the post-film argument should find plenty to chew on. Possibly raw.
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