Soft for Digging

More 'spooky ass shit' in the Maryland woods, but despite a reported budget of $6,000, this bracingly confident debut owes far more to silent movies than to Blair Witch or any other modern horror. It's a virtually dialogue-free exercise in suspense, as a reclusive old coot (Mercier) witnesses what looks like the murder of a young girl (Ingerson) in a forest clearing. His investigations lead to a sinister orphanage, yet nothing is quite as it seems. An elliptical, tantalisingly ambiguous miniature, the film manages to strike just the right nightmarish balance between queasy black humour and genuinely disturbing eeriness.