A Night In The Woods (15)

Time Out says

Wed Sep 5 2012

Thirteen years after ‘The Blair Witch Project’, the curse of the ‘found footage’ movie lingers on. For three twentysomething hikers in this British horror, a camping trip to the haunted Wistman’s Wood ends up as ‘Three Go Mad on Dartmoor’. Or perhaps the local legend about The Huntsman – who hangs sinners from trees – is true. Either way, you won’t give a toss about Brody (Scoot McNairy from ‘Monsters’), his girl Kerry (Anna Skellern) or her guitar-strumming ‘cousin’ Leo (Andrew Hawley), a third wheel who is more intimate with Kerry than the camera-obsessed Brody would like.

All the characters take turns with the camera(s), but no amount of shaky-cam footage or imaginative sound design can lend coherence to these improvised scenes, which were shot on location before being patched together in the editing room. Most unforgivably, director Richard Parry cheats by showing us pristine footage of stuff that happened before the trip began. That might help to contextualise the relationships, but it fundamentally undermines the ‘found footage’ strategy.

Author: Nigel Floyd