Horror directors often disguise low budgets in creative ways. They’ll pull from the “Jaws” playbook and keep their creature hidden in a way that’s both suspensive and minimizing expensive shots. Or maybe they’ll shoot in low light, around corners, and through shadows, making sure you can’t really tell that something that doesn’t look right. The truth is that most hardcore horror fans are an incredibly forgiving bunch. Unless you’re a master craftsman and cinematic sleight of hand, we would usually rather see your shoddy creature work than be annoyed by the filmmaking that tries to obscure it. This is the misunderstanding at the core of “Beware Boiúna,” a giant snake movie that barely lets us see the snake, choosing to throw the camera around and turn up the aggressive score every time it attacks characters that are almost impossible to care about. There is one phenomenal sequence in the middle of this frustrating movie that’s almost worth seeing, but it only speaks to how much the rest of this creature feature doesn’t work by being an oasis in the center of so much nonsense.
2026’s Scream Queen Jessica Rothe (also at Fantastic Fest in “River” and “Pathetic Fallacy,” giving three very different performances) stars here as Alli, one of the leaders of a medical mission into the heart of the Amazon rainforest. Her ship is being maintained by a woman named Lena (Kiana Madeira) and Lena’s father, who seems to be holding it together with willpower and grit. When Alli and Lena stop at an outpost along the river, they encounter a group of colonizers led by a slimy Logan Marshall-Green, who’s sort of the Jon Voight of this venture if one is comparing it to “Anaconda.” Although, from the beginning, director Mike Nelson isn’t going for the B-movie fun of that ’90s cult classic: He somehow got in his head that he should make a giant snake movie that takes itself way too seriously.
And so we get incredibly thin commentary on white colonization of the region along with a disturbing attempted assault of Alli by Marshall-Green’s slimy brother. When Lena comes to the rescue, it leads to death, which one would think would make for an interesting dynamic between the two ships of outsiders, but Nelson is really only using this as a fake-out. When both teams get to an outpost that’s currently being occupied by the legendary local snake Boiúna, almost all of the commentary and character work fades away under the chaotic filmmaking style of a movie that never quite figured out what it wanted to be.
The lack of a concrete vision leads to consistent incoherency. Worst of all, Nelson and cinematographer Nick Junkersfeld choose to film every snake attack like the cameraman is literally being assaulted. To say it’s hard to follow would be an understatement. There’s no sense of space or geography, which means there’s no sense of actual threat if we can’t tell what’s happening or where anyone needs to go to escape it. The editing doesn’t help as all we get are flashes of running, screaming, and what could be the slimy skin of a massive snake.
And then it all slows down. There’s a fantastic scene in which Lena gets stuck in what looks like a tar pit (see pic above). It’s probably just mud but it’s so thick and deep that she can’t move without risking sinking further. Along with being a reminder of how jungle adventure movies used to always eventually get to quicksand, it’s the only time in the back half of “Beware Boiuna” when the movie settles in and defines its geography and stakes. She’s stuck with suffocating mud up her chin, the bad guy is the only person who could save her, and Boiúna is slinking around the exterior of her impossible situation.
Of course, the movie gets dumb again after that, but there are a few shots in the climax that hint at what the whole film could have been. Nelson appears to be reaching for thematic resonance by placing the final showdown on a construction site, the heroes using the tools of man (chainsaw!) to battle a creature whose habitat never should have been invaded in the first place. The small problem with Nelson’s muddled, dismal creature feature is that you’ll probably be rooting for the snake.
This review was filed from the premiere at Fantastic Fest. It opens on October 2, 2026.
