Kryptic

A few months after cryptozoologist Barbara Valentine disappeared hunting for the mythic Sooka creature in the BC backwoods, Kay (Chloe Pirrie) tags along with a women’s walking group trekking through the same terrain. Branching out on her own, she has a close encounter of her own — emerging dazed and confused, no longer the same woman. Lost in more ways than one, she drifts across a highly sexed and misogynist Canadian hinterland, bouncing from seedy bars to middle class suburbia, becoming someone else along the way.

Oozing psycho-sexual anxiety, Kryptic feints toward creature-feature quirk, but its oddity morphs into something altogether stranger, slipping and sliding across fixed identities like a David Lynch movie, purposefully pitching us into a cosmic space beyond sat nav, where our coordinates have been scrambled. It gets murkier, muckier, yuckier… Kourtney Roy does not hold back! Playing a double role, Chloe Pirrie is a sister under the skin to Andrea Riseborough’s Mandy, while Cayne Mackenzie throws a big synth score over the whole thing, steps back and lights the match…

A beautiful meditation of gender, time, and slime. Lots of slime.

Mary Beth McAndrews, Dread Central

A feminist-driven revenge movie as much as it is a a sickening (at times) creature feature, director Kourtney Roy has intentionally developed the thinking man’s thriller. Confusing and confronting, metaphorical and macabre, Kryptic is a dark fairytale of the little-girl-lost temperament that needs to be experienced above all. It may not make sense, but it’s undeniable how much you’ll remember. 4/5 stars.

Peter Gray, The AU Review

Kryptic is bizarre, jarring, and esoteric in its abstract approach, and Chloe Pirrie is the anchor holding it together.

Meagan Navarro, Bloody Disgusting