Our Happy Place (2024) Raindance Film Festival Review

Our Happy Place (2024) Raindance Film Festival Review

Raya, a lonely woman caring for her bedridden husband, is haunted by terrifying nightmares. She wakes up each morning in the forest, falling deeper into freshly dug graves beneath her. As supernatural forces torment her and the line between dream and reality collapses, she unearths a horrifying secret buried within the woods—and herself.

I wasn’t sure about OUR HAPPY PLACE to start with; we see main character Raya (Raya Miles) tending to her bedridden husband Paul (Paul Bickel, who also directed, produced, wrote and did the camerawork) day after day and having online conversations with her friend Amy (Tracie Thoms). Raya wakes up each day away from the house and lying in an increasingly deeper grave. This series of events repeats for most of the film’s opening thirty minutes and despite intriguing and abrupt flashbacks I was feeling like OUR HAPPY PLACE was going nowhere.

However, as the story unfolds pleasingly supernatural elements are pulled into the mix and from that point on it becomes tonally a quite different movie and a much better one. There are a few ‘reveal’s some of which you’ll see coming and others that you won’t. Its full on from the thirty-minute mark and you’ll need a good lie down afterwards to catch your breath and recover from a near constant stream of ‘boo’ moments. When the horror comes it does not let up, axe murders, a spectral presence and time jumps, and Paul Bickel is to be applauded for portraying a quiet menace onscreen and juggling elements of murder mystery and a psychological thriller wrapped up within a haunted house setting from behind the camera.