Fantasia Fest 2020: ‘Unearth’ is a surprising fracking delight

The plight of a farming community comes into severe emotional, psychological, and financial strain in Unearth, a feature playing this year’s Fantasia Fest. Co-directed by John C. Lyons (Schism) and Dorota Swies (There Are No Goodbyes), the film explores human desperation, the monstrosities of major corporations, and ties that forever bind us to the earth itself. A lean runtime, it’s an unexpectedly gnarly body-horror flick wrapped inside a dysfunctional family drama.

Two families saddle next to one another, each doing what they think is best, and when a leading oil and gas company breathes down their necks, someone has to make a choice. Horror icon Adrienne Barbeau plays Kathryn Dolan, the stern, immovable matriarch, whose son Tom (P.J. Marshall, American Horror Story: Freak Show) has very different ideas about how the farm should be managed. Meanwhile, Tom’s wife Aubrey (Monica Wyche) and sister Christina (Allison McAtee) find themselves tangled in between. Christina eyes big dreams of becoming a world-class photographer, much to the chagrin of her family, and the day she can finally leave those county lines behind.

Across the street, George Lomack (played by Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Marc Blucas) struggles to keep his once-thriving garage afloat and can’t even seem to sell off parcels of his own farmland. George is your typical blue-collar family man, and despite his best efforts, nothing ever seems to go right. His youngest daughter Kim (Brooke Sorenson) is a teenage mother not even out of high school, and his oldest Heather (Rachel McKeon) flies back into town to take control of the family’s finances, quickly learning reality is much worse than she first imagined.

When Patriot Exploration comes a knockin’, George sees signing his land away as the only viable option. He must save his family from total ruin, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes. His decision to sell doesn’t sit too well with Kathryn, and the friction between the two families soon reaches an all time high.

Unearth takes a good long while to rev into overdrive, but the viewer is fully engulfed in the lying, cheating, and other questionable moral dilemmas of these two families. You almost forget you’re watching a body-horror flick, so when things start to go down, it’s a satisfying pay-off. One year after the oil company strikes ground and sets up shop, an unidentified malevolent force seeps into the water supply. It can only get worse from here, and boy, does the story erupt into freakish apocalyptic mayhem with some wonderfully disgusting body transformations.

To really appreciate Unearth, you must first allow yourself to get totally lost in this grim reality of rural America: an existence where major corporations are just as cruel and monstrous as things that go creepy-crawly under the ground.

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