The Oxbow Cure

Lena is a middle-aged woman who has recently been diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. In an attempt to come to terms with her transforming body, she leaves her home in the city and her ailing father to begin a new life at a remote cottage in Northern Ontario. There she begins to create an interior routine while exploring the natural world encircling the cottage.

Lena learns of her father’s death and mourns the loss from afar. Later, she watches as an emaciated figure hobbles across the frozen lake outside her cottage. She locks the door and tries to push the image from her mind, but the figure remains a source of both fear and fascination. The following day, Lena hikes through the forest, seeking the creature. She finds a few signs: a claw-mark in the trunk of a tree, a patch of half-eaten berries.

As the sun descends, she realizes she is lost and the temperature is dropping. Just as the forest goes dark and panic sets in, an ethereal, pulsing light appears in the trees. Lena follows it back to her property, but instead of returning to the safety of her cottage, she chooses to pursue the flickering orb out onto the ice. The light extinguishes, leaving Lena alone on the lake and unable to find her way back to the shore, she succumbs to the cold.

The next morning, Lena awakes and stumbles home. After nursing herself back to health, she decides draw the creature to her. Returning to the bramble of berries, she picks every last one and lays a trail from the lake to her front door. That night, the creature appears. Lena lets it in and the two observe one another hesitantly. Lena loses physical control, but the creature’s presence calms her. She touches its face, revealing an eyeball beneath the dried flesh. It rears up in pain, its eye freshly exposed to the light. After darkening the room, Lena comforts the thrashing creature. Slowly it calms and they lie together on the floor.

Still locked in a tight embrace, the creature is awoken by the morning sunlight streaming in through the windows. Lena watches in horror as it bolts away in agony. Days pass and the sun begins to thaw the snow and ice, exposing a world of green below. Somewhere in the woods, the creature, now dead, is revealed beneath the melting snow.

• Claudia Dey as Lena
• Grace Glowicki
• Marvin Weintraub
• John Gastold
• Adam Barnes
• David Runham

The film received generally positive reviews from critics during its limited theatrical run. NOW Magazine's José Teodoro called it "a strikingly intimate and imaginative journey into the phantasmagoric wilderness."[10] The Globe and Mail's Adam Nayman praised it as "a potent and poetic piece of portraiture that doubles as a hymn to the frostbitten Muskokan landscape."[11] Jason Anderson for Cinema Scope wrote, "Though feelings of fear and pain are palpable in almost every moment of The Oxbow Cure, a curious sense of exhilaration cuts through the frigid dead. Maybe that’s due to the co-directors’ Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas’ possible realization that they’ve managed to do something uncommonly brave within a Canadian system that bristles at anything resembling an authentic challenge to prevailing norms."[12] Andrew Parker for That Shelf described the film as "the kind of art that makes people household names and will cause those who see it to remark upon it for years to come."[13]

• Official website
• The Oxbow Cure at IMDb