Wow... What a nice surprise this film is. Watched it one evening and thought it was going to be just another minor league chiller. Instead, I found a thriller-chiller-mystery that is remarkably made on what may be a small budget... It doesn't look like a small budget, because everything is done with striking ability. One does know the genre at once, but one can enjoy the swirling 'who-what-where-how' for its entire length. The two actors show enormous potential and do absolutely super work. I want to see more of them...and more of the director of this indie. When you mix 'Outward Bound' with a contemporary appearance and then zap the audience with nicely executed twist, you have a fine piece of cinema. Congrats to all.

Freddy and Ana are just two strangers on a bus when they are suddenly hurtled into a hazy, dreamlike world where it's a race against time to figure out where exactly they are and how to return to the world they once knew. It follows many familiar paths as far as the typical post-apocalyptic genre goes — it's hard not to be bored at times by the lack of originality — but it definitely puts more of a fantasy spin on the trope.I honestly think they drove the romance side of things a little hard. Freddy is interested in Ana pretty much immediately — he's so persistently flirty with her on the bus that I'm almost happy when it crashes. But I'm also someone who is generally annoyed by anything overtly romantic (or sexual) unless it is crucial or somehow beneficial to the plot, which in this case I really don't think it was — I think it just made it a whole lot more cheesy.Their acting definitely left something to be desired, and the script was just so boring that you really couldn't bring yourself to be invested in either of them. There are times when you could basically predict what the next lines would be before the actors would even speak.I did love the wall of blackness surrounding them — it reminded me a lot of "The Nothing" from The Neverending Story. Their efforts to figure out what exactly was happening and how much time they had to escape before they were swallowed whole definitely added some tension.Ultimately, while I didn't dislike the storyline — like I said, it was an interesting fantasy twist on the whole "last people on earth" idea — it just felt like too much was going on at once. I felt like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be post-apocalyptic, a monster movie, a psychological thriller, or if it wanted to try to be some kind of quirky indie romance, and while I don't think it's impossible to combine them all, this particular film just did so poorly. The romance aspect made it way too cutesy and sweet, which I think really distracted from the story and that time and effort could have been spent making it a bit more deep and complex. Not to mention I'm supposed to believe that Ana finds out that Freddy was, in fact, responsible for her aunt's death — something she has been drowning in guilt over for HER ENTIRE LIFE — and then she falls in love with the guy? STAHP.

Ryan Smith co-writes and directs this chilling mystery. Ana(Karolina Wydra)and Freddy(Steven Strait)meet on a bus back to their hometown. After the bus crashes, they realize they are sole survivors of the fateful journey. Ana, a nurse, and Freddy, a comic book artist, figure they must have been in comas a couple of months. They both awake in their own homes and discover there is not another living sole in their small community. When a mysterious dark fog starts to swirl and slowly encircle the center of town, they soon discover there actually is another resident alive. Resident is putting it mildly; it happens to be a chained growling, snarling demonic looking creature that is determined to claw them to death.Other players include: Sandra Ellis Lafferty, Ric Reitz, Bob Penny, April Billingsley, Madison Lintz and Chase Presley.

Just finished watching this, and I immediately came here to find out how many people had been driven crazy by the absurdity of casting between the young Ana and Karolina Wydra's Ana.The young version of Ana is blond and speaks accent-free idiomatic English, while the dark Karolina has a clearly halting Slavic manner as the adult Ana. It is so dissonant as to make the movie rather strange to watch--definitely breaks concentration.I have to believe that poor Ryan Smith had the studio dump the casting on him, as no director with eyes & ears would ever seek out this level of dissonance.