The River directed by James Wan [BlumHouse]
[Horror]
1867
Drew Barrymore plays a woman (blue dress spotted with red flowers, white apron, hair up in a white bonnet) who notices a dead body floating down the river that bends around her cabin, in the edge of the forest in the state of New York. Over a period of five days, she sees another 3 bodies (1 man, and 2 women) floating with the current - one of whom she recognizes as her friend - while she is tending to her
land.
Drew walks into the middle of the river, and lets herself drift down the current, staring at the sky and branches reaching into view. She ends up in a lake, where hundreds of bodies are lifelessly floating. She tries to stand, looking for her friend Lily, when she hears laughter behind her. Cautiously she turns her head to see a man (brown coat, brown pants, brown hat, white shirt) standing with a grin on his face. He immediately charges towards her, and she makes her way through the bodies, onto land.
Through the woods, Drew comes across a cabin, makes her way inside, looks out the window, and through the cracks of the door. She stays in the cabin for 3 days, and contemplates suicide, while she lays in the empty bed in the corner of the room, staring at the ceiling, by a lit candle. bedside.
On the third day, she leaves the cabin, and heads back to the lake. Drew, staring at the bodies, hears a man praying. She walks into the water, and rests/floats herself on the surface of the water, pretending to be dead. The man in brown cries to himself, and stumbles up the river.
Drew makes her way up along the river, to find out where the bodies are coming from, and sees a wooden barn with it's doors open, at the top of it. She walks into the mill, the smell of rotting flesh and buzzing flies in the air, rattling her senses. She calls out for someone
A drop of blood hits the side of her face. She looks up to see 15 bodies hanging from the ceiling.
Drew starts to cry. The man in brown approaches from behind her, and screams in fright as he takes off his hat, revealing bludgeons on his skull. The man knocks her out with a shovel and ties her up, and hangs her from the ceiling.
Drew regains consciousness, and imagines herself running towards the mouth of the river, and letting the current float her down the river, once more...
The man in brown is named Jonnie Archerstone, a man who lost his left eye due to repeatedly being beaten with a hammer by a doctor trying to remove a cranial lymphoma, when he was only 11 years old. To escape from this trauma, and the physical depredation, Jonnie would hide in the woods, create a trench in the soil/mud with his finger, let the water he collected from a stream run through it, with ants he killed from a nearby hill. The head injuries he suffered from left him with the incapacity to feel sympathy and compassion, and he went through life in a disassociated state, where he felt the only way he could survive, was to see how many ants he could fill in a lake, at the bottom of a river . . .
Based on a true story.
