Creature features usually promise a fair fight. Somebody finds the weapon. Somebody learns the rule. Beware Boiúna never offers that deal. The jungle was there first and it will be there after and the people moving through it are only borrowing the space.
The question
We put that to director Mike P. Nelson during our Fantastic Fest interview alongside star Kiana Madeira.
“Never feels like something that our characters are actually supposed to defeat. This is just an entity that lives in the woods that is gonna win at the end of the day. How did you make sure it always felt like nature had the upper hand?”
His answer
Nelson did not argue with the premise. He treated it as a problem he had already solved with a camera.
“It was so much how we photographed the jungle. How we took our characters through that harrowing journey.”
The framing does part of it. The route does the rest. Nelson described the characters being brought down to a level as the wilderness works on them. That is erosion rather than defeat. He mentioned Lena rising at one point and embracing her past to reach survival. Then he landed on the part that matters most.
“There is a moment in the movie where everybody’s screwed. You don’t have a chance. If you are in this situation you have to find something else within you to get out of here. There is no way that survival actually happens on your own.”
He finished the thought with four words that could serve as the logline. “You’re not getting out.”
What Madeira brought to it
Madeira framed her character’s relationship with the jungle as fear and reverence at the same time. She described a place that is unpredictable and grand and huge. Lena grew up on stories about it. Her parents were killed in it.
“Don’t mess with something that you really stand no chance going up against.”
A monster you can kill is a plot. A force that simply outlasts you is older and colder than that. Horror has understood the difference since the genre started. Nelson is working that second register here and he built it into how the movie looks before anyone had to say it out loud.
Beware Boiúna had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest. Lionsgate releases it in theaters on October 2.
