Kryptic (2024)
Directed by Kourtney Roy
Screenplay by Paul Bromley
Starring Chloe Pirrie, Jeff Gladstone, Jason Deline, Ali Rusu-Tahir, & Pam Kearns.

Drama / Horror / Thriller

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS!
Turn back from these woords,
or be forever spoiled.

Kourtney Roy’s surreal and slimy Kryptic begins with a woman called Kay Hall (Chloe Pirrie), or at least that’s who she thinks she is, going on a nature hike at Krpto Peak where cryptozoologist Barbara Valentine went missing three years ago searching for a mysterious entity. Kay has a strange encounter with the beast, then forgets her own identity, focused solely on finding Barb, who actually kinda looks like Kay, too. Thus commences an odd-yssey, as Kay encounters crypto-obsessed locals, horrific men, and plenty of slippery, sloppy adventures along the way to hopefully figuring herself out and finding Barb.

The uniqueness of Kryptic is in how it goes against the grain of most, if not all previous cryptid-related films that came before it, by portraying Kay’s bodily connection to a fabled cryptid that goes beyond studying strange things in the forest, forcing the viewer to think existentially about identity. Roy’s film encourages plenty of thinking about creatures like Bigfoot and what we believe it to be—we get references to John Keel‘s “superspectrum” and Canadian cryptid legend Ogopogo, among all the existentialism—yet its biggest focus is on the people who search for these creatures and what they’re really trying to find out there in the woods. Kryptic further begs the question: who are the real monsters, the unknown creatures of the woods, or the brutal, everyday creatures we call men?
Roy’s Kryptic finds a pathway into existential questions about identity through Kay’s body-centric journey that finds its roots in Barb’s quest to find the Suka—a fabled entity in the woods near Krypto Peak, and likely many other forests. But it’s essentially Barb seeking the unknown to learn more about herself. In the film, one character remarks that cryptozoology means “the study of the hidden.” Barb winds up lost after searching for/studying her hidden self; however, is she really lost? Sure, people are searching for her, she’s technically a Missing Person, and her husband is worried sick at home. Does that really mean she’s lost? By the end of Kryptic, it’s pretty obvious that the situation is the other way around. Like “Amazing Grace” so eloquently sings: “I once was lost, but now am found.” It takes getting lost for Barb to find herself again. Because this is not Barb discovering herself for the first time. She knew who she was once, but, somewhere along the way she actually got lost within the trappings of an awful marriage.
Early in the film, one woman, following a mention of Barb’s disappearance, jokes that she “probably just up and left, pissed with her man.” Another woman on the hike near the beginning, after Kay doesn’t speak up since she doesn’t even remember who she is, wonders: “How do you not know you who are?” Later, we eventually work backwards with Kay until she returns to Barbara’s home—her own home—where husband Morgan (Jeff Gladstone) is waiting desperately for her to finally come home and/or be found; it’s there we discover exactly why poor Barb dissociated in the first place, forgetting herself entirely, forgetting the person she wanted to be before marriage bogged her down until she couldn’t see the forest for the trees anymore. Morgan’s patriarchal control over Barb pushed her into the woods and into her confrontation with the creature, which led her down a rabbit hole of body-identity issues. Maybe the most significant person Barb meets in the film apart from the Suka is Sasha, who’s played by trans actress Ali Rusu-Tahir. Sasha tells Barb: “People like us gotta stick together.” She understands the alienation Barb’s feeling from herself, and her own body, just from a different perspective. Their brief time together is a brilliant touch in a story about losing/finding oneself in the spaces between body and identity.

There’s surprising eroticism throughout Kryptic. We hear about how the Suka “had a big, giving mouth, all wet and sloppy” or how the cryptid seems to leave behind “residue from the megacosm that stinks like semen.” Ultimately, the film deals with an erotics of the self in how Roy chooses to portray the experience of meeting the Suka similarly to the way sex is depicted, too. Kay/Barb’s first encounter with the Suka, sex, and even her assault, are represented in such an incredibly unique way because we see the Suka/the other person physically invading Barb. Roy’s unique visuals portray the ways in which sex penetrates not just our bodies but our entire being. The film emphasises an importance of both body and mind when it comes to who we are underneath the skin, the meat, and the bones.

The domestic life that Barb has found herself locked into by Morgan, who controls her at every level of behaviour to be “a good girl,” has clearly destroyed her sense of identity. She scoffs at a couple in her neighbourhood about to have a baby: “Well that would explain why she looks half dead.” Not that long after returning to supposed domestic bliss, Barb rightfully lashes out at her controlling husband, telling him that he’s become “a fucking monster.” After everything Barb’s experienced, the most monstrous things she’s seen are the things men have done to her, whether her rapist in the woods or her own husband. Her experience with the Suka wasn’t a violent one, the creature didn’t attempt to hurt her; it did invade her, in a sense, but not to hurt her, and not to find pleasure in it like men. The Suka helped Barb on a path towards self-(re)discovery. Her encounters with men damaged her both physically and, perhaps even more so, psychologically. The Suka helped Barb reconnect with herself, even if it does take some blood and violence in the end to completely take hold of her identity again. Because of their meeting, Barb returns to herself, though not without new perspective about who she is, and, more importantly, who she wants to be.