At the Place of Ghosts (Sk+te’kmujue’katik) Review

Bretten Hannam’s At the Place of Ghosts (Sk+te’kmujue’katik) is a bewitching folk horror that eschews cheap thrills in favour of a more meditative experience.

I can’t speak to the film’s autobiographical elements or lack thereof, but it tells a deeply personal story rooted in the filmmaker’s own Mi’kmaw culture. Siblings Mise’l (Blake Alec Miranda) and Antle (Forrest Goodluck) reconnect for the first time in years after a dark entity visits the former at their job in a diner, leaving an indelible black mark on their arm. With apparently instinctual awareness, the siblings both know immediately what this means and what needs to be done. They set out to traverse the forest of Sk+te’kmujue’katik, where time collapses in on itself and ghosts from the past live, in the hope of expunging their demons.

The forest plays a similar role to the one in Alex Garland’s Annihilation, in the sense that it represents a liminal zone where characters reconsider established ideas around both the world and themselves. But unlike that film, in which alien contact is the cause, the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of Hannam’s surreal heterotopia remain unanswered. It’s one of several shrewd decisions that help create an at once immersive and alienating atmosphere.

With limited dialogue and an emphasis on the visual, the film is full of striking imagery that often belies our expectations of indigenous storytelling. An encounter with colonial British red coats jarringly disrupts our communing with nature, while a later episode that sees the siblings stumble upon an ominous minimalist structure, seemingly transplanted from the future rather than the past, is the film’s most transcendent experience. Hannam prefers practical effects, but the instances of CGI are convincing enough, belying a tight budget on all but a couple of occasions.

Central to the construction of this bewitching setting is the cinematography of Guy Godfree, who is helped by the stunning views of Nova Scotia, but nonetheless brings to the environment a living, breathing photographic style. His camera moves intuitively as we explore the surroundings with the protagonists, and despite the temptation to capture the natural beauty with epic landscape shots, he trains his sights on the leads through a series of intimate close ups. Jeremy Dutcher’s eerie score, a blend of traditional music from the area, typical horror fare and creations all his own, works harmoniously with the film’s visual elements to form what at times feels more like an immersive video installation than a work of narrative cinema.

The lead performers display strong on-screen chemistry as siblings reckoning with increasingly evident familial trauma and more universal struggles with masculinity and communication. Their respective frustration and the inadequacy of language as a mediator are depicted with touching empathy. Like with Hannam’s treatment of colonisation, some viewers might want more from the director’s economical approach to such big ideas, but the film would have lost its meditative allure if it had spelled everything out.

The tension deflates a little in its final act, as the origin of the siblings’ troubles is revealed in a conventional flashback, pandering to a Western need for narrative resolution. It’s a shame only because of the majesty of what comes before it. In step with the traditional storytelling ethos of many First Nations communities, At the Place of Ghosts (Sk+te’kmujue’katik) shines when its focus is on the journey, not the destination. And what a transfixing, dreamlike journey it is.

At the Place of Ghosts (Sk+te’kmujue’katik) had its World Premiere at TIFF on September 6, 2025.