Mitchell Altieri’s “Consumed” (2024) witnesses a return to the much-referenced Wendigo, a demon that plagues Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary” – one of the deeds that adorn his much longer rap sheet. With its necromantic power, the demon with the forest as its lair feeds on people and reanimates them. Only it is not the humans that are brought to life. It is the skin-stealing monster that is revivified through the life energy of its prey. A mad caveman is also at the other end of the film’s plot. Played by Devon Sawa, the caveman remains a hovering threat till the end, as long as his intentions are not strained through the murky water of who the real hunter is and what is to be hunted.
Consumed (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
Married couple Beth and Jay are in the forest following rocky trails through the green foliage deep within the Mahoosuc Range of western Maine in the United States. It is the couple’s celebratory camping trip, which comes at a time when Beth is allowed a respite after her long fight with cancer. Beth anticipates a good time in the forest with her husband. However, she is plagued by the images that appear in her dreams while in the forest.
Once, when Beth was washing herself along a brook, she witnessed the horrifying sight of a worm-infested dead bear that had been ruthlessly decorticated. Jay does not pay too much heed to it and thinks it to be a deed of poachers. Jay brings Beth to a nicely decorated campsite with fairy lights, wildflowers, and food servings. At night, sitting around the bonfire, Jay asks Beth to burn the hospital wristband bearing her name as a mark of her freedom from cancer.
What is the dream that torments Beth?
At night, Beth is plagued by the vividly descriptive dream again. It is the image of Beth during her cancer diagnosis. We understand this as in the dream, Beth, in her hospital gown and devoid of any trace of hair, is strapped to a stretcher. One of the sleeves of her gown is half drooping from her shoulders, so the viewers can understand that she has undergone a mastectomy. Beth is immobile and held hostile, not in a hospital but in a dark forest. Suddenly a pair of bony hands rises from beneath the stretcher and tears open her incision with blood gushing out.
Beth wakes up and decides to take a stroll outside. She bumps into Jay, who says he left the tent while Beth was asleep. This baffles Beth because she felt Jay was sleeping when she left the tent. They hurry back to their tent and, to their horror, find all their belongings destroyed. Their makeshift haven is inundated with an unidentified pus-colored viscous fluid. Soon, they can sense a creature storming towards them.
How does Beth find Quinn?
While trying to escape the grasp of their strange hunter, Beth and Jay spend the entire night in the forest without a roof. Jay gets his leg trapped in a bear trap in search of a trail. Following a lot of blood and flesh loss, Jay finds it impossible to move. Beth leaves Jay behind and goes deep into the forest to seek help but gets chased by a mysterious black gush of wind.
Beth goes astray too far and finds herself in an abandoned building. What invites her is the horrible sight of the skin of dead human beings hung around the walls like deflated tires. The howling creature chases her again, and she bolts out of the place. As she takes shelter in a deep crater in the ground, a wild caveman saves her. The man carries the injured Jay and Beth inside his underground bunker. A moldy, dark chamber, populated with abandoned shoes, perhaps of trekkers, serves as the caveman’s asylum.
The man introduces himself as Quinn. Quinn painfully readjusts Jay’s bone and asks Beth to quietly sew the flesh, as their hollering would draw the monster in. Quinn finally gives the unnamed monster after them a name—it is the Wendigo, a creature that possesses the ones lost in the woods. The supernatural creature chases people and steals their skin, as the legend has it. The thousands of disappearances in the American wilderness can be attributed to this shapeless creature.
Why is the Wendigo drawn towards Beth?
The following day, Quinn asks Beth to leave Jay behind in the bunker and accompany him in finding a trail. Noticing a locket with a girl’s photo that hangs around Quinn’s neck all the time, Beth asks if the girl in the picture is his daughter. Quinn reveals that he lost his daughter in the woods while out hunting. While pacing back to the chamber, Beth loses sight of Quinn and falls back in the clutches of the Wendigo. The horrifying nightmare of Beth being strapped to death is unleashed again with the reappearance of the monster. However, Quinn scares it away with gunshots. When asked why he left, Quinn says that he did not want to give away his position to the monster.
Once inside the bunker, Beth checks on Jay and realizes that if they linger in the woods for too long without medical intervention, Jay is going to die of sepsis. However, Quinn prevents them from leaving his bunker. He asks Beth if she is sick and if she has been having nightmares ever since she got into the forest. Noticing Beth’s hesitation in opening up, Quinn tells Beth that the Wendigo does not just go after any given human being.
It is almost after people who are weak or are terminally sick. They are its best target. Their imminent death means the Wendigo does not have to wait too long before getting under their skin. Beth reveals that her cancer has relapsed, and Jay is oblivious to it. The Wendigo, however, could not be fooled, and from the moment she set foot in the forest, constantly communicated to Beth that it was privy to the presence of the disease that was slowly decimating her body.
Is Beth sacrificing herself to save Jay from becoming the Wendigo’s next victim?
In a smoking session between Beth and him, Quinn recounts the memories of his dead daughter. After some time, he falls asleep. Utilizing the moment, Beth tries to crawl down a tunnel that is hidden right below the floorboard on which Jay is sleeping. Beth lights up a matchstick to survey the den. She finds piles of decomposed dead bodies – worm-blighted, half-eaten, blood-splattered dead bodies.
Beth realizes that Quinn is about to use Jay as bait to hunt the Wendigo, similar to how all these people have ended up in his bunker as one whole mass of dead bodies. She offers herself to be used as bait instead of Jay so that Quinn can have a clean target at its head. Quinn takes her back to the forest.
Will Beth survive after escaping Quinn’s deadly trap and confronting the Wendigo?
As the Wendigo approaches nearer, Quinn cocks the gun and displays Beth as bait to draw its attention. The Wendigo engulfs Quinn in a black cloud and hypnotizes him by allowing him the sight and voice of his daughter. Quinn never kills it, and it shocks Beth. The Wendigo, after killing his daughter and stealing her daughter’s skin, has now become his daughter. Revenge was never an option for Quinn. Instead, he lures the Wendigo towards him using a bet to catch a glimpse of his daughter and ‘feed’ her.
Quinn drags Beth to a noose that he has prepared – something that her dreams foreboded her of. Despite her best attempts to free herself, Quinn forces her to wear the noose around her neck. But Beth is not one to be deterred as she wounds him by stabbing his neck with a claw that she collected from their ruined campsite left behind by the monster. We see the dying Quinn’s body getting dragged away offscreen by the Wendigo. Beth severs the rope with a knife that she had sneaked away from Quinn. However, remaining dangling by her neck for too long strains her neck and causes asphyxiation, which further causes her to pass out.
Consumed (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
How do Beth and Jay escape the maws of both Quinn and the Wendigo?
Beth finds herself in the decrepit house with human skin hung around its mossy walls. In a horrifying turn of events, through Beth’s point of view, the viewers are opened to witness the skin-crawling moment when Quinn is found again. However, only his skin remains plastered around a tree trunk. The Wendigo attacks Beth from behind and draws her back to her nightmare.
In her nightmare, Beth lies as immobile as before and rises a little to see Quinn arriving by her bed. Quinn has no eyes. He says he has been deprived of the sight of the starry night sky. When Beth wakes up, she finds herself inside a dark cave with orbs of light resembling colored galaxies. The Wendigo tries to break down Beth’s spirits by constantly affecting her with her nightmares. In the nightmare, Jay and Quinn appear and negotiate the possibility of finding peace in eternal sleep. Beth is supposed to believe in that. However, visions of death do not mar her determination to see through the devil.
As the Wendigo appears in its menacing form and tries to drag Beth’s soul away, Beth hacks its head off its body. It is difficult to describe the appearance of the Wendigo. But its wearing of human skin over its face endows it with the quality of a humanoid. What is left of the monster in the end is its most rudimentary form, resembling a larvae. Beth squashes it with her foot and kills it instantly. In the end, Beth finds Jay, and together, they seek a safe trail.
