The Last Cabin (2025) - Horror Film Review

There was something refreshingly simple about the very indie found footage horror The Last Cabin. I have seen a fair few from this sub genre lately and all have suffered by having a very lengthy set-up. Thankfully, this one gets straight to the action, and also doesn't outstay its welcome with a lean seventy minute run time.

Ben (Brendan Goshay), Shawn (Tanner Kongdara - Amy and the Aliens) and Hope (Isabella Bobadilla) are three location scouts who feel they have stumbled across the perfect location for their next shoot; a newly built cabin out in remote woodland. After encountering the strange property manager (John Fantasia), they strike a deal with him to rent the place for a few days to do some filming. They haven't been there long at all when they notice that they are being watched by someone wearing a creepy clown mask, and it soon becomes clear that the silent figure and his two equally silent clown mask wearing accomplices intend violent horrors for the trio. With their phones jammed, the three have to try and find a way to escape the cabin and alert the authorities.

After a brief prologue in which a different group of friends are murdered by the mask wearing clowns, the film really begins in earnest. I have gotten used to a good forty or so minutes of set up in found footage, but here it begins almost immediately. This plunges straight into the action by having the film begin when it is already pitch black outside. It might be a good half hour until the first character (post-prologue) is killed off, but prior to that there was plenty of threat. To be honest, I don't think the prologue was really needed, it doesn't add much aside from a higher body count, and it takes away some of the mystique from The Strangers type antagonist figures as it is clear that murder is their goal.
At one point the protagonists discover a series of DVDs, each of which is hinted to show a different group of people being killed, in a way that reminded me of parts of the excellent Sinister. That would have been a much better introduction to the viewer as to how the clown mask people operate.

The story is incredibly basic, but as a found footage horror this does what it sets out to do in a way that was very welcome. I appreciated the swift intro into terror, and also that it moved along at a swift pace. Characters didn't really have too much to them, but I thought some of them shone. Fantasia was effortlessly unsettling as the property manager, and film crew manager Kevin (Benjamin L. Newmark) delighted with his cruel uncaring persona. He impressed enough that my initial amusement at the lame reason why Shawn was filming everything actually retroactively made sense, as did the reason why the trio didn't flee at the first sign of trouble.
The movie is indie and that stretches to the kill scenes which lack impact, but I would also say can be very inventive when they choose to be. Often the violence is implied rather than shown on screen, but this works to the constraints of the budget. With a shorter run time there wasn't as much filler dialogue, but a scene in which Hope records a video message to her parents apologising felt very by the numbers and generic. There are moments of jump scares here but they actually worked on a couple of occasions, and while the epilogue wasn't that original, I did appreciate it as a way to end this type of film.

The Last Cabin is one of the better found footage horrors I have seen this year. I have respect for the back to basics approach to the story being told, I found the design of the clown masks to be effective, and there wasn't too much of the elements I dislike from the sub-genre, such as ad-hoc dialogue and shaky camera footage. It might not blow your mind, but this was an entertaining horror that shows less can be more. The Last Cabin comes to on-demand on April 29th thanks to The Horror Collective.

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