Girl in Woods, 2016
Directed by Jeremy Benson.
Starring Juliet Reeves, Jeremy London, John Still and Charisma Carpenter.
SYNOPSIS:
Grace Walker and her fiancee Jim take a romantic journey into the Smoky Mountains to celebrate their engagement, but after a tragic and fatal accident, Grace is left alone with only the woods and her demons for company…
Across the entirety of Girl in Woods, you get the feeling Jeremy Benson’s movie should have in reality ended up a short film. Such economy would perhaps have allowed for a conceptual punch even just over eighty minutes is too long to deliver, with a central concept that while sounds interesting on paper is scuppered by a poor script and utterly leaden pacing. In essence, Benson’s story is the creation of an urban legend, the origin tale of a later horror picture we haven’t yet seen, but that’s not necessarily immediately apparent; much of the picture follows around Juliet Reeves’ Grace, the eponymous girl in woods who witnesses the tragic death of her fiancée (Jeremy London) and subsequently becomes lost in the Smoky Mountains, where she literally faces her demons.
Juicy plot description, huh? ‘Facing her demons’. The problem is that it’s such a catch-all term that in the context of Benson’s approach it just translates to Grace wandering around the forest talking to herself, having flashbacks and visions, and generally making almost no attempt to actually, y’know, go home. It’s a psychological horror built on a house of contrivances and forced, poorly written character motivations.
It’s partly down to budget, but also heavily down to skill. Benson clearly wanted this to be a pulpy, exploitation-style horror calling back to earlier decades; indeed the way he titles Girl in Woods rather than Girl in *the* Woods suggests a bluntness and stripped back naturalism he never quite achieves, not even with the Hammer-style opening burst of retro titling. Pulpy horror of years past often didn’t have any money either but they created either a sense of camp, histrionic blood-letting or palpable, low-fi dread – Benson succeeds in neither.
He lays a cod-symphonic score on thick which often drowns out the script, indeed he seems to have a problem with sound mixing across the board, especially when it comes to Reeves. He gets plenty of atmospheric forest shots and intersperses them with violent moments of horror or blood, primarily through the mechanism of Grace’s visions, but they neither shock, engage or repulse. It’s like plodding through treacle while waiting for a twist or a payoff that doesn’t come, and frankly the reason Grace is as demented as she turns out to be is easy to guess almost from the beginning.
That’s the other primary issue, indeed the most problematic: character. Benson might have got away with his uninspiring direction and script had he managed to craft a compelling central character, but Grace is simply a shrill idiot for most of this, and Reeves just isn’t anywhere near interesting or good enough an actress to draw us in; she’s basically traumatised by the apparent suicide of her father as a child and possible ghostly manifestations of her mother (played bizarrely by Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Charisma Carpenter). We also have no escape from Grace for the entirely of the running time – this is about her facing the inner trauma of her childhood and it forces Reeves to hold the screen, which she just isn’t capable of doing.
Carpenter just glides and screams her way through, London’s fiancée is a clueless bellend who barely features, and try as they might to make it sweet, the late John Still’s manifestations as her grandfather can’t help but come off as Werther’s Original-level old man creepy. By the time we reach a conclusion where we might have bought Grace’s complete transformation, you’re rather left wondering how Benson thinks he can get away with some painfully awkward moments of trying to build tension, and a few final beats of savagery to bring Grace where he needs her to be. It comes to something when the end credits are more interesting than the entirety of the preceding film, given what they suggest comes next.
On the one hand, you feel Girl in Woods had the potential to be more than the sum of its parts, but on the other there’s a sense it should have stayed on the page. Jeremy Benson takes a simple, survivalist, ‘final girl’ psychological horror concept and though he has some potentially interesting ideas, a relatively neat suggestion of subsequent mythology, and the occasional nice shot, his story and character work is utterly disposable and quite the endurance test. Poorly paced, with a bland script and a rubbish central performance by Juliet Reeves, it’s a film not gory enough to be entertaining, violent enough to be disgusting or horrific enough to be scary. It just exists, and lacks much in the way of recommendable merit.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★
Tony Black is a freelance film/TV writer & podcaster & would love you to follow him on Twitter.
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