A young woman makes an audacious escape from a monster’s realm. Seeking retribution, the monster lures her unsuspecting daughter to its remote walled forest.

SYNOPSIS:

Cambridge cartography graduate Mena Mills learns of a mysterious walled forest in remote Russia. It’s been owned by one family for a thousand years and has never been mapped.

And there’s no way in.

Mena’s past suggests a link. Her dead mother, a fiery Russian beauty gave her nine year old daughter a precious football. But it was lost over a high wall into deep woods. Mena climbed the wall to find the inexplicably spinning ball had disappeared.

A silver football pendant is worn as a penitent reminder.

Together with fierce, vulnerable nurse Sara Gomez and botanist Nathan Philips, Mena gathers information on the forest. Satellites show complete canopy, but Nathan discovers a river, and perhaps a waterfall. More concerning, sepia photos show wooden circles containing stick figures and eviscerated animal carcases hanging from trees.

Unperturbed, Mena seeks permission to map the forest without reply. Her email, however is marked read.

Mena hits it off with professional Caver Tweed Tomkins who’s at Cambridge conditioning for an expedition. On discovering Russia is his destination things take on a fateful quality. After Mena’s unacknowledged email, Tweed is contracted to survey the Wall; coincidence?

The journey there is incident strewn; they encounter grave stones speaking of danger ahead, pack animals subversive to the Wall….or what’s within. They discover a well hidden tunnel entrance with a carving of an unsettlingly realistic tree with limbs.

Inside, the forest is ethereal, another world. One they cannot understand- encountering carved tree men ten feet high. Then a primitive dwelling with an aged woman speaking in tongues. But her message is unmistakable: They will not return.

Unnerved, they wonder on. More carved sculptures of the tree man appear as though from nowhere in the shadows. The ethereal beauty twists into something else; Sara finds a life sized stick figure inside a wooden wheel. Tweed knows they are being watched. Mena dreams of the lost ball, always out of reach, fuelling her unease. Conflict begins to disrupt their harmony.

Mena buries her pendant in a Russian doll; closure for the troubled memories of her mother.

In the night they awake to guttural screams; the life-sized wheel is ablaze, Sara tied within.

Terrified, they fly through the forest, but Nathan then Tweed are picked off. Mena, lost and exhausted, comes face to face with the Wood Man- the ‘carved statue’ - come to life!

A flight of pure desperation ends at the dwelling. Terrified and at a loss for reason, Mena retreats within, gut-punched to see the football she lost as a child.

She is home.

INTO THE FOREST