Hunting Matthew Nichols Opens Wide to Mixed Reviews
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- Markian Tarasiuk made his feature directorial debut with "Hunting Matthew Nichols," a self-distributed Canadian found-footage horror that opened on over 1,000 North American screens on June 10 following a wider sneak preview the prior week.
- The film is structured as a mockumentary in which Tara Nichols (Miranda MacDougall) returns to Vancouver Island to investigate the 2001 Halloween disappearance of her brother Matthew (James Ross) and his best friend Jordan Reimer (Issiah Bull Bear) in the island's forests.
- The missing teens were aspiring filmmakers obsessed with "The Blair Witch Project," and the 1999 film is explicitly name-checked in the dialogue as a possible inspiration for the boys' ill-fated excursion.
- The film's first roughly 80 minutes keep its protagonists out of the woods entirely, leaning on mock vintage TV news clips, talking-head interviews, and occasional scenic shots from cinematographer Justin Sebastian rather than active peril.
- Miranda MacDougall's lead performance is described as histrionic and "more exhausting than empathy-inducing," while co-players Tarasiuk and Ryan Alexander McDonald receive little character definition beyond their documentary-crew roles.
- The climactic final minutes in the forest are called "sufficiently creepy" and deliver strong payoff, though the review concludes they don't fully redeem the preceding runtime or justify sequel interest.
Why it matters: The 1,000-screen self-distributed indie rollout marks an unusually wide reach for a micro-budget found-footage horror, but the mixed verdict — strong finale, padded middle — underscores how difficult the Blair Witch template remains to sustain over feature length, with the genre now crowded by imitators of varying quality.
