An old, all-girls' private school, deep in the woods, turns out to harbour a horrific secret in 2006's The Woods. I suppose that's inevitable. It's not a bad movie though it feels slightly like it's pulling itself apart.
It kind of feels like the souls of two movies are at war, and one of them halfway devours the other, not out of malice but just blind hunger. There's a spooky little potboiler about a quiet but also rebellious teenage girl called Heather (Agnes Bruckner) finding she's met her match in a quiet but oppressive private school. She's aware her mother kind of hates her and the headmistress (Patricia Clarkson) exploits this with some chilling psychological manipulation. This movie is psychological and melancholy.
The other movie, the one that ultimately wins, is an Evil Dead movie. Bruce Campbell plays Heather's father, Joe, and while it feels like his presence was meant to be minimal in the beginning, by the end he's completely upstaged the whole movie and has basically become Ash. He doesn't say a word of dialogue in his first scenes which led me to notice just how well he can communicate volumes with facial expressions alone. But when one student manages to call him and get him to come pick Heather up, he immediately becomes the hero, ready to hack away at the evil vines that would drag the girls into the woods and to eldritch doom. Not unlike the woods and the vines in Evil Dead.
There wouldn't be such a see-saw quality if Agnes Bruckner could match Campbell's sheer force of personality. But while she was serviceable for all the quieter scenes, she just doesn't have the wattage Campbell has. He's kind of playing on the level of Jack Nicholson in The Shining and I think Shelley Duvall works as a counterpoint because her brittleness is of equal intensity to Nicholson's ferocity. Bruckner is completely drowned out by Campbell even when Campbell has less dialogue and screentime. But I do enjoy me some Bruce Campbell, so what the hell.
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