"A Night in the Woods" (Guardian 07/09/12)

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.