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(Fright Fest UK 2026) ITHAQUA Has Plenty of Hunger...but Not Enough Bite

By. McKinley Gray

Casey Walker’s ITHAQUA, presented by the resurrected Hammer Films, made its world premiere at Tubi FrightFest in London on August 29. The title refers to a creature created by Lovecraft acolyte August Derleth, though the folklore upon which it draws has roots in Algonquin traditions. Set at a Canadian fur-trading fort during the brutal winter of 1831, the film follows Cole (Luke Hemsworth), a hunter who acts as an intermediary between the Ojibwe and the fort. McKellar (Michael Pitt) oversees the settlement, and as food supplies dwindle, he places increasing pressure on Cole to find something that can keep its residents alive. Hunger soon gives way to desperation and madness, while the Ojibwe warn of a spirit capable of giving people an insatiable appetite for human flesh. It is a premise seemingly built for folk horror, with colonial violence, isolation, starvation, and an unforgiving wilderness all waiting to close in. Unfortunately, ITHAQUA rarely makes that wilderness, or the people inhabiting it, feel as frightening as they should.

            ITHAQUA could plausibly be called folk horror, western horror, or a revisionist western.  However, with only 97 minutes and clearly limited funds to work with, the movie struggles to dedicate enough resources to any niche and Walker makes some decisions that undermine any tension being built. The snowy backdrops this movie is set in are beautiful and do provide a sense of isolation and hostility, but the way Walker and cinematographer Bryan McCashin choose to capture them was disappointing.  There are many transitional sequences with a lot of wide shots of the characters traversing the snowy landscape, but the camera is too dynamic and the editing is insanely frenetic given the context.  The shots don’t feel leering; I don’t feel as if I’m being watched by some unknown entity in the frozen expanse.  Some shots could just as easily be used in an offroad SUV advertisement; the only presence felt is that of the camera itself.

            Outside of these transitional sequences, the tension is undermined by most scenes being crowded with people.  Walker rarely chooses to amplify the feeling of isolation of this remote fort by isolating the characters from each other.  There’s hardly ever an air of mystery to who is good and evil, both for the audience, and the characters in the film. It’s a shame because despite the budget being pretty limited (if the low quality cgi is any indication), the film has some rather nice costume and production design that could have been used to terrifying effect, but instead the climactic moments of the movie feel more like a conventional battle scene than true horror.

            Despite the scenes often feeling packed with characters, hardly any of them feel three-dimensional. The native characters are, to put it mildly, not thoroughly fleshed out. Ahnung (Leenah Robinson) is Cole’s girlfriend, but there’s hardly a hint of anything to her character beyond that. She loves her grandmother (Pamela Matthews) and warns of the looming danger just like her grandmother does, but even something as simple as what she sees in Cole is hard to say with any certainty.  However, this is not a problem limited to the native people within this movie; Cole is just as one dimensional.  He embodies the trope of a man on the frontier who is haunted by his violent past, except Walker only ever uses a few brief flashbacks to convey this and there is no depth or complexity to this aspect of his character.  He shows no signs of darkness anymore and what little we see of his past shows no signs of light. A man was evil and now a man is good with no arc to show for it, just a binary switch that the film failed to make me believe or emotionally invest in.

            Michael Pitt is the real standout performance, giving a wonderfully unhinged performance and injecting some theatricality into the film. Unfortunately, this theatricality does not fit in seamlessly.  Aside from Mckellar (Pitt), every character in ITHAQUA fits into one of three narrowly defined categories.  There are frontiersmen who are quiet and stoic, the other residents of the fort who lose their minds and might as well be zombies, and  the native characters whose main narrative purpose is to warn all the white people that they will fall victim to the spirit because of their hubris. McKellar feels out of place among this cast of characters and his exaggerated movement and dialogue would feel more at home in A Clockwork Orange.

            ITHAQUA is perhaps best viewed a few months from now in the dead of winter in a drafty living room.  Maybe then I would feel the despair and isolation that the movie wants to evoke.   However, on this warm September day, more than anything I felt that Casey Walker couldn’t quite decide what he wanted the main thrust of this movie to be.