Slash/Back

The film is not just important but also entertaining to the core. Her first feature shows Innuksuk is already a master filmmaker who has made a kick-a*s genre picture with dead-on horror instincts.

It’s the moments of more personal observation — about how the girls relate to each other, to their elders, and to a culture that’s a sometimes uneasy blend of Canadian and Indigenous — that gives this picture its spark of originality. There are lots of genre movies like this. None are this one.

Innuksuk approaches everything with such a generous, supportive spirit, it seems churlish to focus on shortcomings in a film with so much personality. ... "Slash/Back" seems bound to find a cult following, but it will mean the most to Inuit audiences, for whom standing up to invaders is more than just another genre-movie cliché.

After all its blood is spilled – on perfectly white sheets of ice and snow, of course – Slash/Back still announces the arrival of a major talent in Innuksuk. Here is hoping that she gets to kill bigger and better Canadian actors for many years to come.

Despite its horror-film veneer, Innuksuk wraps the viewer in a warm blanket of nostalgia whenever the film threatens to chill. But Slash/Back has enough creep factor to settle any argument purporting that Stranger Things only happen in the cozy climates of Midwest America.

Slash/Back gains its greater power with its entertaining narrative of these Inuit heroes warding off invaders, trying to save their home while earning a deeper pride in that very place and its people. It’s sincerely sweet and entertaining, and its impact is felt even more as the black alien blood starts to fly.

You might be rooting for it at the end as fervently as you were at the promising beginning. But by then, it’s already disappointed, with far too many punchless punchlines for its own good.