Movie Review} Anacoreta (2025): A Scorpion by Any Other Name

Let’s get one thing out of the way. The opening of Anacoreta hits differently right now. A woman recites the fable of the scorpion and the frog, the one where betrayal isn’t malice, it’s just nature, and depending on how the last few years have treated you, that little parable is going to land somewhere between darkly funny and deeply personal. For at least half the country at this particular moment, it feels uncomfortably familiar. Jeremy Schuetze knows exactly what he’s doing opening his film this way. Whether everything that follows lives up to that promise is a more complicated question.

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Anacoreta is a found footage meta-horror film from Vancouver filmmaker Jeremy Schuetze, who directs, co-writes, and stars, playing a fictionalized version of himself alongside a cast doing exactly the same thing. The premise is the least original thing about it: a group of friends heads to an isolated cabin to shoot an experimental horror movie. You know the drill. You’ve always known the drill. The film knows you know the drill, which is the point, and also occasionally the problem.

Bad Artistic Directors and the Horror They Create

Here is something I will confess freely. If I had a dollar for every time I had a vision and my talented collaborators had to perform some form of creative CPR to make it a reality, I could fund an indie horror film myself. Probably two. I am, by my own admission, occasionally that artistic director. The one with Big Ideas and an inverse relationship between enthusiasm and practical execution. So watching Jeremy, the character, operate on screen was a deeply uncomfortable mirror. He is an absolute scumbag, and I wanted this movie to pivot into a slasher purely so he could have his head pulled through his back during a morning yoga session. That the film resists that particular impulse is both admirable and faintly infuriating.

What Schuetze the director understands, even when Schuetze the character is testing the limits of your patience, is that interpersonal tension is its own genre of horror. The first act is mostly traditional. The found footage framing doesn’t buy us much in those early scenes. The justification for why the camera is always rolling is the usual narrative scaffolding we’ve been tolerating since 1999. But once the group dynamics start developing their sharp elbows, the film finds its footing.

If you have any unresolved trauma from a bad group project, and statistically you do, Anacoreta has something specific and uncomfortable waiting for you.

Coffey Road and the Creepy Pasta That Actually Works

The cemetery scene arrives like a bucket of cold water. Sharp, confident, and genuinely unsettling in the way that only the best urban legend horror manages to be. There’s a reason every town had its version of that one road, the one with the devil worshipers, the one your older cousin told you about in the dark, because that particular flavor of dread is baked into something primal. Schuetze taps directly into that vein here, and the result is the film’s single most effective scare.

The urban legend that structures the back half, something about a cursed family frozen in ritual at a table, has the texture of genuine creepy pasta. The kind that sounds like it might actually be real. The kind you half-remember hearing at a sleepover. That’s a hard thing to fake, and Anacoreta doesn’t fake it.

Committed to the Uncomfortable

The film’s greatest technical strength is also its most polarizing choice. Schuetze as director is genuinely comfortable letting a scene breathe past the point where most filmmakers would cut. The awkwardness accumulates. The silence overstays its welcome in ways that feel intentional rather than slack. It gives the film an authenticity that is hard to manufacture and harder to sustain.

The lighting design is worth noting. Anacoreta is often purposely, aggressively dark, occasionally to the point where you suspect you might be missing details that matter. But when color does announce itself, it lands with real force. There is a Giallo sensibility lurking in those pops of color, a visual vocabulary that suggests the film has done its homework on the genre it’s interrogating. The cursed film thread that weaves through the back half scratches a very specific itch for anyone who loves that particular horror subgenre, and it’s handled with more restraint than you might expect.

The Third Act Problem

And then the shaky cam kicks in. Look, I’m either getting old or there was a significant amount of it, and I’m prepared to admit it’s probably both. The final act loses some of the disciplined discomfort that made the middle sections work. Characters sit on logs and discuss their feelings about the situation, which while authentic, does test your patience. The performances hold those moments together. Antonia Thomas in particular is doing the heavy lifting of keeping you emotionally tethered. But there’s no avoiding that some viewers are going to clock out.

The ending is the film’s most significant stumble. Without spoiling it: I wanted the creepy image payoff. The murdered family standing behind everyone, frozen and wrong and deeply horrible. It exists as a suggestion in the film’s DNA, and Anacoreta not fully committing to it feels like leaving a really good punchline on the table.

The Verdict

Anacoreta is a solid slow burn that puts the creep in creepy, and mostly earns it. It won Best Horror at the Heartland International Film Festival and Best International Feature at Manchester, and neither of those feels undeserved. This is ambitious, disciplined indie filmmaking that understands what it wants to be and mostly gets there. The interpersonal horror works. The urban legend mechanics work. The meta-commentary on artistic obsession works, occasionally too well for comfort.

It won’t be for everyone. If found footage tests your patience on a good day, the pacing here is going to push your limits. But if you’re the kind of viewer who finds the dead air between scares as interesting as the scares themselves, Anacoreta has something real to offer.

The scorpion always stings. The frog always drowns. The only variable is how long you spend in the water.

Anacoreta is available now on Digital HD via Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.