One morning in 1940, the entire population of Friar, NH, walked north up an unmarked trail into the wilderness.
Some were later found frozen to death. Others were mysteriously slaughtered. Most, however, were never found.
YellowBrickRoad (2010) begins with 70 year old mystery - where did the inhabitants of Friar, New Hampshire go? Why did they leave their homes, their clothes, even their pets tied up and slowing starving to death? What happened to them? Like the still unsolved mystery of the Roanoke Colony, whose inhabitants disappeared leaving only one clue behind - the word "Croatoan" carved into a tree - the mystery persists.
The film follows a group of scholars who set out to follow the path taken by the missing community in order to discover what happened to them, to turn the legend into "recorded history."
It isn't long into the expedition before the team's GPS device fails them. It variously locates them in Guam, 40 miles NW of Florence, Italy and "just outside Melbourne." They begin to hear strange sounds and music from the 1940's in the wind. The team posits several possible explanations for these strange occurrences:
1 - Scientific explanations such as solar flares or magnetic resonance or, or, or...
2 - Human pranksters playing a joke on the team
3- A shared psychosis spread between the members of the team
4 - An act of God.
"What if the people of Friar believed this was the road to God or the Wizard or whatever?"
But the path they follow, this "yellow brick road," as the tag line of the movie says, does not lead to "a fairy tale ending." It leads into madness and horror and despair.With elements of the Roanoke Colony mystery, the Bermuda Triangle, and even Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - the movie leads the viewer deeper and deeper into madness and inexplicable mysteries.
When the team realizes that they can't rely on their electronic GPS device, they turn back to the surveying equipment of their cartographic experts and their compasses. They make detailed notes about their heading and the distances they've travelled, but the numbers don't add up. They're lost. And they can't follow their calculations back the way they came because the "numbers only make sense going forward."
The ending of YellowBrickRoad has left some reviewers unsatisfied. Little is explained. The mystery is not solved. But this is a movie about being lost and being lost in madness. The numbers only make sense going forward. If you try to look back from where you came, it won't make any sense.
If I were going mad, how could I tell?
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