Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Slash/Back’ on Hulu, A Kid-Centered Creature Feature Set in an Inuit Community

There are many communities overdue to have their stories told on screen, and among that hypothetical list, Indigenous populations ranks high. The sci-fi/horror flick Slash/Back (now streaming on Hulu) provides a lot of insight into how that group lives. It also lets them play out an intense battle against a strange parasitic extraterrestrial life force!

SLASH/BACK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In a Canadian arctic hamlet, a group of young Inuit girls face down the usual dramas of being teenager. There’s dealing with the pressures of popularity. There’s annoyance with family obligations. Oh, and there’s a seemingly alien creature that is possessing the bodies of animals and beginning to cause problems that they are the first to detect! While this tentacle-like nuisance feasts on the unsuspecting, these trained hunters (and horror movie fans) are ready to face down the threat to their squad and their town.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Take the Indigenous angle of Reservation Dogs and cross it with an alien/supernatural creature feature like The Thing or It Follows, and you have some approximation of Slash/Back.

Performance Worth Watching: This is an ensemble piece with a bunch of teenage girls who are all quite good at portraying that age’s angst. But the leader of the pack, Tasiana Shirley’s Maika, takes charge with poise and confidence.

Memorable Dialogue: When dispelling the notion that the mysterious happenings around town might be tied to local mythology, Maika snaps at her younger sister that these are “just stupid old people stories made up because they didn’t have internet yet!” It’s a moment that perfectly captures the tension between tradition and modernity in which the teenagers find themselves stuck.

Sex and Skin: There’s plenty of gross manipulation of skin by the alien lifeform in Slash/Back, but nothing that comes close to sexual.

Our Take: The bona fides of director and co-writer Nyla Innuksuk, who is herself from an Inuit hamlet, are never in doubt. Slash/Back is full of vivid, tactile detail that grounds this genre story in a palpable sense of time and place. Even things like the social currency of cell phone data access feel rooted in personal knowledge. That granularity clashes with the plotline’s adherence to convention, which relies on simple story beats and broad archetypes as cinematic shorthand. The film also struggles to define its audience. Is it hardcore genre fans who want to see a lot of blood splatted across the snow? Or is it teenagers like the characters who might find it fulfilling to see their own strength displayed on the screen? The film serves neither constituency particularly well by trying to satisfy both – and fully pleasing neither mode of activation.

Our Call: SKIP IT. While there are certainly interesting elements of Slash/Back, those are mostly relegated to the setting and characters. The plot itself is rather familiar, which may please those genre enthusiasts who just want to see a new variation on the hits. For others, it may just prove not nearly a big enough spin on the formula to be a worthwhile watch.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, The Playlist and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.

Watch Slash/Back on Hulu