An ethologist is tracking animals in a remote mountain forest and get's trapped in a ruined village when the river he crossed get's too high for him to go back. He continues with his work but starts to find dead animals everywhere, hears strange sounds coming from ruined buildings and one one occasion sees two ghostly girls caught on one of his remote cameras. At first our hero has the safety of his RV to stay sane but when it goes missing he has to spend the nights in the ruined village and that is when the horror really starts to set in.
Across the river is basically the essence of a slowburner, the entire movie revolves around the main character as he roams the village (mostly at night of course) in search for whatever it is he is hearing. To be fair, there isn't really much going on here, the movie takes its sweet time building atmosphere and if you are expecting your average j-horror inspired shocker from seeing the dvdcover you will be sorely disappointed. What the movie delivers on is an excellent location and a protagonist that is quite believable, acting rationally in a very strange situation and that does a lot in keeping it from descending into something that easily could have been just silly. It is mostly a one man show apart from a couple of scenes with an old couple to fill in a bit of backstory and that is what makes the movie work. The sense of loneliness together with an unknown threat lurking in the darkness helps tremendously with the suspense. It's not perfect, however strong the atmosphere may be the movie still moves just a little bit too slow but apart from that I had a decent enough time and the finale is quite creepy.
Maybe not for everyone but an accomplished movie that you might enjoy on a dark night with the lights turned off.
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