ANACORETA movie poster | ©2026 Filmhub

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Antonia Thomas, Jeremy Schuetze, Matt Visser, Jesse Stanley, Ben Gulliver, Alonso Lozano
Writers: Matt Visser and Jeremy Schuetze
Director: Jeremy Schuetze
Distributor: Filmhub
Release Date: February 24, 2026 (digital)

ANACORETA begins with Jeremy (Jeremy Schuetze, who also directed and co-wrote the film) guiding Antonia (Antonia Thomas) through a recitation of the scorpion and the frog fable. (If anybody doesn’t know this, the point is that betrayal is inevitable with some people, even if it leads to their own self-destruction.)

So, we are forewarned as Jeremy, girlfriend Antonia, actors/longtime buddies/couple Matt (Matt Visser, ANACORETA’s other co-writer) and Jesse (Jesse Stanley), videographer Ben (Ben Gulliver, ANACORETA’s director of photography), and sound recordist Alonso (ANACORETA’s sound operator) head for a long weekend at Jeremy’s late grandpa’s cabin in the woods.

Jeremy wants to make a naturalistic horror movie that is largely improvised and instructs Ben and Alonso to record everything. However, even though he can cut around it, Jeremy doesn’t want anybody to refer to what they do in real life, i.e., that Antonia has a promising acting career, etc.

Because he is intensely passive/aggressive, Jeremy hasn’t written a script for this outing. Instead, he tries some surprise scares to get real rises out of his actors/pals that momentarily work but then intensely annoy those affected.

Jeremy has also latched on to a local legend about ghosts that drag people to Hell under certain circumstances. Meanwhile, Jesse has some health issues.

Anybody who has ever worked on a creative project can attest to the aggravation factor when the director can’t easily articulate what they want and isn’t prepared. But because in ANACORETA, most if not all of the characters are protective of their friendships, it takes a while for things to become remotely confrontational.

So, this much is lifelike, if not especially engaging. We get to know the characters in the way we might get to know people in a similar situation – i.e., not all that well, since we and they are waiting to get to work.

The actors are all well-modulated and believable. This might have gone better if ANACORETA had decided whether it wanted to be a deep dive into what happens when someone wants to act on an artistic impulse but doesn’t know how to do that, or whether it wanted to be a horror movie after all.

As it is, there’s a problem with the scare factor. We can see where the characters might be somewhat startled by some of Jeremy’s set-ups, but after the first one and the whole scorpion and the frog fable (which gets repeated), we wonder why they continue to buy into it as much as they do.

Even this is not as much as issue as the fact that, while the characters are occasionally rattled, we are not remotely alarmed. By the time we get to a turn, it’s too late for us to experience ANACOREDA as frightening.

But ANACORETA also never fully delves into what’s going on with Jeremy. Despite a few confrontations, we don’t learn much more from continued observation than we comprehend early on. Instead, ANACORETA is a portrait of lackadaisical micro-budget indie filmmaking, plausible, but likely more compelling to make than it is to view.

This said, it should be noted that ANACORETA won Best Horror Film at the Heartland International Film Festival and Best International Feature at the Manchester Film Festival, so clearly opinions vary.

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