“A clever hybrid of true crime and found footage. Hunting Matthew Nichols earns its Blair Witch influences and delivers a satisfying payoff.”
Found footage horror borrows from true crime. True crime borrows from documentary. And documentary wants to borrow your trust. Hunting Matthew Nichols sits at the messy, exciting intersection of all three.
Director Markian Tarasiuk built his earlier short films on quiet tension and unreliable narrators. Those instincts serve him well here. Tarasiuk also steps in front of the camera, playing a version of himself. A documentary filmmaker. A man hired to solve a cold case that haunts one Canadian family.
On Halloween night 2001, two teens vanished. Matthew and Jordan went into the woods near their small town. They never came out. For over two decades, Matthew’s sister Tara carried the weight of that night. Now she teams with Tarasiuk to dig up answers.
This setup places Hunting Matthew Nichols squarely inside the modern horror hybrid trend. Audiences have seen the formula before. A missing person. A dogged investigator. A stack of old interviews and grainy photographs. But the film knows its lineage. It wears its influences on its sleeve without apology.
The found footage subgenre has a checkered past. For every Blair Witch Project, a dozen lesser imitators collapsed under their own gimmicks. The format demands a careful hand. Too much shake, and viewers check out. Too little chaos, and you lose the raw nerve that makes the style work.
Tarasiuk understands this balance. He also understands that true crime fans expect more than jump scares. They want the slow burn of revealed secrets. The small lie that grows into a big one. The witness who remembers something new twenty years later.
Hunting Matthew Nichols delivers those beats. But then something changes. A discovery shifts the entire hunt onto stranger ground. The camera stays on. The questions get harder. And the line between documentary and horror blurs until you cannot find it anymore.
Do not call it a parody. Call it a love letter written in the dark. Call it a reminder that some woods keep their secrets for a reason.
Here is what happens when the hunt turns inward.
Hunting Matthew Nichols Review: Found Footage That Knows Its Prey
A Horror Movie Review by George Wolf.
The hunt feels real. The horror feels earned.
Is this a faux documentary? A true crime thriller? Found footage horror? It’s all of that, at least some of the time.
You know what, just don’t worry about it and enjoy the clever way Hunting Matthew Nichols tips its hat to a variety of genre influences.
Director and co-writer Markian Tarasiuk plays himself as a documentary filmmaker out to solve an over-two-decades-old missing persons case. Canadian teens Matthew and Jordan went missing on Halloween night of 2001, and now Matthew’s sister Tara (Miranda MacDougall) is teaming with Markian to get to the bottom of what really happened.
Early on, we come along on an engaging hunt for clues. A succession of solid supporting performances bring welcome authenticity to Tara’s fact-finding interviews, until a surprise discovery turns the film on its found footage ear.
The missing kids were big fans of the Blair Witch Project, and took a camcorder into Black Bear Forest to uncover the local legend of Roy McKenzie. This turns out to be a slyly organic way of acknowledging the big comparisons that will follow, and to setup the type of in-your-face finale that more than a few BWP naysayers may have preferred.
The ride is well-paced and impressively assembled, and the payoff is satisfying enough to make you forget about who’s manning the camera or why we’re watching reactions to a shocking videotape instead of the tape itself.
But this Hunt is a fun one, and it comes complete with a mid-credits stinger that flirts with the possibility of another chapter.
If so, count me in.
