A Night in the Woods (15) 82 mins ***
Another week, another
found-footage horror. This good-looking, creditably tangled Brit entry benefits
from a better-than-average jolt-count and rigorous, dirty-fingernails acting
from Scoot McNairy (Monsters) and
Anna Skellern as a troubled couple – he’s a garrulous Yank, she’s a repressed
Brit – using their handicams as digital confidants whilst on a camping tour of
Dartmoor; an opening title card informs us that the pair, along with Skellern’s
cousin Leo (Andrew Hawley), subsequently disappeared. Richard Parry’s film
suffers from a certain post-Blair Witch
familiarity as the night-vision gets toggled and evidence of a local legend
(“the Huntsman”) is discovered dangling from the trees. Yet it’s unusual in
using its 80-odd minutes to burrow down into these characters and match their
psychic states with the (still underfilmed) location’s physical terrain: one
way or another, these relationships will end up on the rocks.
A Night in the Woods opens in selected cinemas today, ahead of its DVD release on Monday.
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