![‘Lost In The Jungle’ Review: ‘Free Solo’ Team Explore Survival, Trauma & Dark Spirit In The Amazon [Telluride]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/07162859/LostInTheJungle_071.jpg "‘Lost In The Jungle’ Review: ‘Free Solo’ Team Explore Survival, Trauma & Dark Spirit In The Amazon [Telluride]")
Lost in the jungle narratives aren’t new. There are countless movies of this ilk, both in dramatic form and non-fiction. And while junglecologists like Werner Herzog’s most famous documentary about this subject, “Little Dieter Needs To Fly,” is striking, it’s 1998’s poetic, lesser-known “Wings Of Hope” as one of his most haunting portraits. The latest entry in this genre, “Lost In The Jungle,” from Oscar-winning filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (“Free Solo,” “The Rescue”) and Emmy-winner Juan Camilo Cruz, isn’t as dreamy as either, at least not at first, but it’s layered and expansive, using a survival format to tell a story about endurance, trauma, fractured communities, spiritual hauntings, and the yearning to break free from captivity in all its forms.
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Beginning in tragedy, a mother attempting to escape her abusive, estranged husband boards a small plane to rural Colombia with her four children. Shortly after takeoff, the plane crashes, killing all the adults onboard, including the matriarch. Miraculously, the only survivors are the children—ages 13, 9, 4, and just 11 months—suddenly thrust into an unforgiving rainforest and forced to endure a 40-day ordeal. Led by the eldest daughter, who drags herself forward on a badly injured leg, the siblings survive on rainwater and scavenged fruit, wandering in circles through a landscape that seems intent on disorienting them, possibly swallowing them whole.
Meanwhile, a massive rescue effort unfolds. Armed with helicopters and satellite surveillance, the Colombian military launches an extensive search. But the Indigenous trackers—who know the jungle intimately and have lived in its rhythms for generations—are instantly distrustful of the “milicos.” In rural Colombia, Indigenous communities are often caught between drug traffickers who control the land and soldiers who hunt them, leaving native people perpetually under suspicion. The army fears that any Indigenous guides could be a cartel informant. The trackers, in turn, resent being treated like suspects in their own territory. That combustible mistrust makes the mission volatile until necessity forces both sides into uneasy cooperation.
While the army boasts overwhelming resources, the trackers prove far more attuned to the rainforest’s labyrinth. Their practical and spiritual knowledge, and the film leans into this dimension. Believing the children are being led astray by a selfish, potentially nefarious jungle spirit, they employ rituals to guide their search, including ayahuasca. Initially dismissed, these mystic practices gradually earn respect as progress is made. Eventually, disdain gives way to respect, and the factions form a fragile alliance that fuses modern tactics with ancestral wisdom.
The Amazon itself looms as the film’s most formidable antagonist. Panthers, snakes, insects, and the suffocating fog of flora transform the rainforest into a fever dream. In this place, survival is less about moving forward than resisting a hallucinatory pull that threatens to consume. Vasarhelyi, Chin, and Cruz capture this duality—the Amazon as both tangible and otherworldly, a landscape that blurs nightmare and endurance with each passing day.
Formally, the film expands beyond the pair’s usual NatGeo sheen. To convey the children’s perspective, the directors employ dreamy animated passages voiced by the surviving kids themselves that translate their ordeal into surreal, fractured memories. These sequences highlight how trauma distorts perception, collapsing the border between reality and nightmare. Alongside animation, “Lost In The Jungle” incorporates docudrama recreations—stylized reconstructions of the siblings’ 40 days—woven with archival footage and testimony. This approach sometimes risks feeling too polished, but it also provides the immersive immediacy the story demands. It’s a technique the duo honed in their excellent, heart-in-mouth “The Rescue,” which similarly blurred documentation and dramatization to plunge audiences inside an ordeal that defied conventional record.
The jungle, however, isn’t the only prison. A darker undertow emerges as testimony paints the picture of the children’s abusive father, whose violent control lingered long before the crash. His presence during the search adds bitter tension, reframing survival as more than a struggle against nature. The Amazon becomes a metaphorical space of captivity, echoing the suffocation they endured at home. Liberation, then, isn’t just about making it out alive but about escaping cycles of violence that had long defined their lives.
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As always, Vasarhelyi and Chin orchestrate high drama with procedural precision. Days slip by, hope fades, and each new clue—shelters, bottles, tracks—reignites urgency. Cruz, meanwhile, seemingly roots the film in Colombian specificity, contrasting the NatGeo luster with Indigenous perspectives and spiritual layers that deepen its resonance.
“Lost In The Jungle” is both glossy and raw, procedural yet mystical. The polish may smooth over some edges, but it still lands as more than a survival tale. It’s about broken families, divided communities, cycles of violence, and the faint hope of reconciliation.
Ultimately, the film is not only about children who refused to surrender, but also about a country that, for a brief moment, managed to put aside divisions in service of something greater. Like the best of Vasarhelyi and Chin’s work, it transforms an extraordinary true story into something more universal: a tale of endurance, release, and the desperate search for light. [B+]
“Lost In The Jungle” premieres September 12 on National Geographic and streams September 13 on Disney+.
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Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2007. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
