Devil's Pass is your basic found-footage-style, pseudo-documentary thriller in which a group of plucky young filmmakers go off to investigate an old, unsolved mystery, only to disappear and become victims of the same calamitous forces they were researching, ultimately turning into a part of the mystery themselves. Unfortunately, the picture suffers from the same fatal flaw as the worst entries in this genre: The college students whose footage we spend the movie watching are way less interesting than the phenomenon they're studying. And what's truly tragic about that shortcoming in this particular case is that the mystery was taken from real life. The Dyatlov Pass incident is indeed fascinating and creepy, and would make a great premise for a horror flick -- it simply deserves a better one.
The main characters who comprise the documentary team are Holly (Holly Goss), JP (Luke Albright), Jenson (Matt Stokoe), and Denise (Gemma Atkinson). They've received a grant to study the infamous Dyatlov Pass incident, in which a group of nine backpackers mysteriously turned up dead in the Russian mountains in 1959. All were half-clothed, exhibited high levels of radiation, and were found in odd places and poses for a group of highly experienced mountaineers. Some even had inexplicable wounds (crushed skulls and missing tongues), despite having no defensive or exterior injuries. Theories abound on the topic, with experts attributing the deaths to everything from yetis to aliens; there are also intriguing scientific (or pseudo-scientific) phenomena brought into the conversation, like hypothermia-induced dementia that makes freezing people think they're overheating and remove their clothes, or meteorological events in which the rapidly changing direction of the winds causes severe disorientation.
All of these possibilities make the incident a topic of conversation among real-life conspiracy theorists -- and thus, the ideas provide plenty of cool answers to the freaky questions posed by the people in this movie. The only problem is that not enough time is actually spent exploring these scary ideas: Most of the film is spent watching the youths talk and hook up and get lost and freak out. It's possible that if their characters were more compelling, we might be more invested in watching them get picked off by the forces of winter darkness that may or may not be KGB agents. You'd certainly think that the terror of the frigid Arctic climate and possible Cold War conspiracies would provide enough suspense to keep the film interesting, but sadly, this is not the case. Hopefully this won't be the last thriller to use the Dyatlov Pass incident as a jumping-off point, because if there's one thing Devil's Pass gets right, it's the inspiration.