A girl who lives secluded in a house in the woods with the only company of her father and a wolfhound finds among the trees a mysterious cubic device with the ability to change the past.

A glass door. A keypad. Darkness beyond. Silence.  A man in a black hoodie, his face obscured, silently walks up to the keypad. He punches in a code, the door unlocks, and he slides inside. He is carrying a backpack. Inside that backpack is a baseball bat.

Another man is walking down the hallway, oblivious to the silent invader. He goes into the kitchen and makes a plate of food. The hoodie man watches silently, ducking out of sight just in time as the man goes about his businesses. The man carries his plate of food down the hallway, with the hoodie man creeping along behind him. The man slows down, sensing something. He stops, head cocked, listening for something, anything. The hoodie man also stops. The man slowly turns and WHAM! is hit by the baseball bat.

And hit again. And again.  Again.

So begins Black Hollow Cage, a very odd, initially confusing, stealthy Sci-Fi thriller that, ultimately, packs a satisfying WTF wallop. Writer/director Sadrac Gonzalez-Perellón takes his time dropping clues here and there, leading us along a very twisted path, one that doubles back on itself many times, to our final destination: the beginning. Or the beginning before the beginning.  A new beginning.

Lowena McDonell stars as Alice, an intelligent girl who lives a quiet life with her father, Adam, played by Julian Nicholson, and her talking dog, called Mom. Yep. Talking dog. Mom.  Okay, the dog doesn’t actually talk, it wears an electronic medallion around its neck that translates the dog’s thoughts into words. Alice also has a mechanical arm that she is trying her hardest to get used to. She practices picking things up and holding them, with a minimum of success.

So, this ain’t your average everyday story.

Into their secluded lives come a brother and sister, Erika and Paul, found out in the vast forest setting. Paul is mute and doesn’t speak, and Erika has been severely beaten up, her face bruised and bloodied. The father invites them back to the house to recuperate and heal.  Alice is wary. Something seems off.  Soon thereafter, Alice is walking alone in the woods and comes across a large, perfectly formed black cube. As she gets near it, the side of it opens up, exposing a small niche. Alice reaches inside and retrieves a note: “They are not to be trusted.” The note is in her own handwriting.

The cube is an obvious deus ex machina, allowing the family to try over and over again to set things right as things go wrong. And more wrong. There is a lot of blood in this movie, and many deaths (more than you would expect for a movie with only 5 characters).  The violence in the movie is all the more shocking when plopped down in the stillness of the rest of the scenes. Still, the pace is glacial and the environment is close to silent (I wish it had subtitles so I could catch everything said), so don’t expect your typical “mayhem in the woods” movie. But if you’re looking for a thoughtful, cerebral, mind warp of a movie, you really can’t beat Black Hollow Cage. Uncle Mike sez so.