Loner (2026): British Folk Horror That Earns Its Scares the Hard Way

There’s a specific type of found footage film that lives or dies entirely on one performance. No ensemble to lean on, no location-hopping to keep things moving, no subplot to cut away to when the main thread gets thin. Just one person, one camera, and the question of whether the actor carrying it can hold your attention for ninety minutes in a Welsh forest.

Charlie Robb can. Loner is not a perfect film — it’s slow, it demands patience it doesn’t always fully justify, and it doesn’t quite stick the landing. But it’s a genuine one, and in the found footage landscape of 2026, that counts for something.

What Loner Is About

Angus Mattock is the kind of person who films everything. He’s not famous, not successful, not particularly close to becoming either — but he has a camera and a plan, and the plan is to turn a wilderness retreat into content. The cabin is remote. There’s no signal. The nearest town is far enough away that it doesn’t feel like a safety net.

For the first third of the film, Angus is genuinely funny in a low-key, self-deprecating way — cracking jokes into the camera, narrating his incompetent attempts at outdoor life, turning isolation into a kind of extended bit. It plays like a wry riff on vlogger culture, the performance holding the irony lightly enough that it never becomes a parody.

Then the sounds start. Breathing in the trees. Screams from somewhere that shouldn’t have anyone in it. A door that was locked last night. And the forest — flat, grey, indifferent British countryside — begins to feel less like a backdrop and more like something that’s been watching him since he arrived.

The Loner Trailer

Review: Loner (Spoiler-Free)

What Loner gets right is discipline. Found footage films at this budget level often lose their nerve — throwing in unnecessary characters, escalating too fast, trying to compensate for limited resources with excessive plot. Charlie Robb and Douglas Tawn don’t do any of that. They commit to the single location, the single character, and the slow accumulation of unease, and they don’t flinch from how much patience that demands from the viewer.

Robb’s performance as Angus is the film’s engine. The character is written as a specific type — the hapless, slightly delusional creative who genuinely believes the content will come together if he just keeps filming — and Robb plays it with enough warmth that you don’t resent spending an hour and forty minutes with him. When the comedy gives way to something more uncomfortable, the shift feels earned rather than imposed.

The folk horror elements are handled with restraint. Whatever is in the woods stays in the woods — mostly. The film understands that what you don’t show is almost always scarier than what you do, and there are individual sequences here that are genuinely effective: a particular scene involving the glamping pod’s roof and an unlocked door has the kind of held-breath quality that great found footage does better than almost any other format.

The issue is the pacing in the middle third. Loner is committed to its rhythm and doesn’t bend for the viewer, which is both its strength and its problem. There are stretches where the film asks you to sit with Angus in a way that doesn’t quite generate enough tension to justify the wait. It recovers, but not everyone will stick around long enough to find out.

As a debut feature, it’s an impressive piece of work — a film that knows exactly what it is and executes that thing with more confidence than most first-time directors manage. Comparisons to The Ritual are apt in terms of tone, and the Ricky Gervais-style awkward humour in the opening act is a smart piece of genre blending. It doesn’t all come together perfectly. But enough of it does.

Verdict

Loner is a slow-burn folk horror that rewards patience without always earning it. Charlie Robb carries the film with a performance that shifts convincingly from comedy to dread, and the restraint Robb and Tawn show in their direction is exactly what this kind of material needs. The middle drags, and the ending doesn’t fully deliver on the atmosphere that precedes it. But as a debut feature from two British filmmakers who clearly understand the genre, it’s one of the more promising found footage films of 2026.

Worth watching if you have patience for slow cinema. Not worth starting at 11pm when you’re tired.

Where to Watch Loner

Similar Movies to Loner

If the single-location folk horror angle worked for you, these films share the same DNA — one person, one hostile environment, and something ancient that would prefer you left.

The Ritual (2017) — Four friends hike through a Swedish forest to honour a dead friend. The forest has its own ideas. The film balances grief and folklore in a way that Loner clearly draws from, and handles the transition from character drama to horror with more confidence than almost anything else in its genre.

Deadstream (2022) — A disgraced internet personality locks himself in a haunted house and live-streams the night. Same vlogger-as-protagonist setup as Loner, but played with more energy and considerably more chaos. A good double bill.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) — Three student filmmakers, a forest, a legend, and a camera. The template that everything else in this tradition descends from. If Loner made you want something more relentless, this is where to go next.

Exists (2014) — Eduardo Sánchez takes five friends into the Texas wilderness and puts them up against something large, fast, and completely uninterested in their survival. Less folk horror, more creature feature — but the isolation and the single-camera format share Loner‘s DNA.