Taking place after Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings and set up before the original Wrong Turn, this installment kicks off with a tense, intrusive moment between a young couple, Billy and his girlfriend Cruz as they lie in a tent and share a nude moment one morning. A shocking prank quickly reveals its dark truth when the intruder turns out to be his friend Gus wielding an ax, sparking a brutal confrontation. The trio—with Gus, his girlfriend Lita, and their buddy Julian—are heading toward Fairlake, West Virginia, for Halloween’s Mountain Man Music Festival, chasing a getaway that will soon spiral into nightmare.
In the woods around the festival grounds, the world sharpens into fear as the city’s media presence arrives. The reporter, Kaleen Weber, runs through the trees seeking a scoop, and encounters the grotesque Three Finger, a brutal member of the hillbilly ensemble known as the Hillicker brothers. Mistaking the killer’s disguise for a costume, Kaleen flips him off with a single finger—an act that ends with him severing her digit and leaving her to scream for help. She’s not just another casualty; she becomes the catalyst that pulls local authority into the fray. The ominous killer’s blade finds Kaleen, and in a brutal turn, Maynard Odets—an oddly calm, long-present menace who has eluded justice for decades—lunges into action, hacking Kaleen to death with an ax. Her severed hand lands near the title card as the film announces its grim entry: “Wrong Turn 5.”
The Hillicker brothers—Three Finger, Saw Tooth, and One Eye—present themselves as a looming threat, and Maynard, with a quiet, calculating resolve, asks for “a hand.” One of the hillbillies offers him the severed hand of Kaleen, underscoring the brutal economy these hunters live by. Meanwhile, the five friends continue their drive toward festival ground, their paths colliding with Maynard in the road. Billy avoids a collision and crashes the car into a tree, setting off a chain of self-defense that ends with Maynard stabbing toward them and the young men fighting back. The mercy of law arrives in the form of Sheriff Angela Carter Carter, who, along with her deputy, arrests Maynard and the three teen travelers, delivering them to town as the town’s calm exterior begins to crack.
In the wake of Maynard’s arrest, the Hillicker brothers ambush the sheriff and dispatch Maynard in a swift but savage assault, stripping him of dignity and cutting away his ability to threaten the town any longer. However, the danger is far from over. In the county jail, Billy confesses to Carter that he’s been smuggling drugs, a truth that complicates any potential leniency. Carter decides to release Gus, Cruz, Lita, and Julian for the moment, while she digs deeper into the killer’s history and discovers that Maynard is wanted for murder and has remained free through decades of pursuit.
Power outages ripple through Fairlake as the Hillicker brothers attack a power station, cutting electricity to the town and leaving its residents vulnerable as the music festival draws most of the staff away. Sheriff Carter finds herself working with a skeletal crew, raising the stakes as she and the others hold back the chaos. With a skeleton crew on duty, Carter arms the remaining deputies and civilians—handing out shotguns to Julian, Mose, and Billy—and tries to call in help via a shortwave radio, though the operator on the other end doubts the seriousness of her plea.
Tragedy follows beauty and bravado as Cruz is discovered by Three Finger and brutally killed—an act that leaves Lita reeling from the loss of her partner. The Hillbillies’ violence escalates when Gus is captured and mutilated, a brutal carving that ends with his body being hurled into a roadside wreck and crushed. Back at the station, Carter’s plan shifts: she deputizes her remaining allies and pushes to contact outside help while keeping the town from imploding.
As the festival continues and distractions mount, Carter faces another harrowing fight when Cruz’s fate is confirmed, and Mose becomes another casualty to the hillbilly ambush in a barbed-wire trap that ends with him burning alive inside an oil drum. Carter’s resolve hardens as she grapples with the loss and the fear of losing more.
Maynard returns to literal confrontation, manipulating Lita into freeing him from his cell, only to reveal a more insidious plan: he ambushes the sheriff, disarms her, and locks her within the station as he spreads his reign of terror. His plan grows darker as he and his hillbillies drench the station with gasoline and stage a final, deadly set piece. In a chilling moment, he has welded a shotgun to Carter’s chest, with the barrel pressed against her jaw—a trap designed to force her to sacrifice herself. The resulting blast obliterates Carter’s head, a shocking and brutal image that underscores the predator’s grim calculus.
The film closes on a haunting, unsettled note as Maynard and the Hillicker brothers drive away into the night, their prisoner Lita in tow. Her scream and the distant whine of the engine echo a cruel truth: the nightmare isn’t over, and the danger in Fairlake remains very much alive. It’s a disturbing reminder of how quickly a peaceful festival town can become a battleground when faced with human monsters who traffic in fear, pain, and control.
