The Woods

I'm not sure what I just watched, rumour has it it was a film about something horrific happening in the woods. I was still waiting to find out what that something was when the credits rolled.

Utter garbage! No real storyline, unlikeable characters. The actors were as wooden as the trees!!

Do not watch this film, if you value your sanity and make better choices! I wish I had.

That's all I have to say, except I'm still 173 words short.

Here's what you could have watched instead: Paint dry Grass grow Water boil The inside of your eyelids Any of those would be much more fun than this drivel...

This film was sluggish and formulaic. The acting was okay, but it really felt like they were straining to make something out of whatever tryhard mess of a script they were handed because their agents couldn't bail them out of it. This was peddled as some sort of psychological thriller, but the only tension throughout was in my resisting the urge to constantly check my watch. It honestly felt like somebody dumped some slasher flick prompts into ChatGPT and ran with whatever scraped Blair Witch nonsense it spit out for them.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but it felt like a writing assignment turned in at the last minute with cookie-cutter tropes and filler stapled together solely for the sake of handing something over to satisfy a grade, rather than as an earnest creative endeavor. It lacks mojo, it lacks direction, and it lacks a soul. I really wanted to like this movie and I try to be supportive of female film makers and all that. But uh, there's only so much I can take for the team before I lose my poker face. I'll make no accusations here, but the marketing seemed to revolve around promoting people in charge of it rather than the project's actual content, leaving me wondering if that might have been the whole point.

Ultimately, this film was about as enjoyable as camping (which is to say, not at all). Perhaps jumping on bland and overdone "witchy" trends should stay on social media, where it can be met with the appropriate attention span.

"Whose woods these are I think I know . . ." Yes, I think Robert Frost knew the woods can harbor ghosts and demons and otherworldly entities. In THE WOODS, a 2024 film directed by Sarah Lyons, the woods hold an otherworldly presence that possesses a vulnerable, unstable young woman named Amy (Samantha Evans) who joins her three friends, Kate (Taylor Harris-Butler), Sam (Tony Tripicchio), and Lucas (Jakob Martinez Cooper), on a backpacking trip following a nostalgic route the four post-college friends took in middle school.

THE WOODS falls into a favorite genre of mine I call "millennials in peril" in which young people - usually a group of friends with their cell phones and typical millennial angsts - get in trouble - often in the woods - as in films such as THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, WRONG TURN (the one released in 2021), and THE CABIN IN THE WOODS.

As a thriller, THE WOODS offers some genuine chills that make you jump, though the woods themselves don't deliver as much tension or horror as the performance of Taylor Harris-Butler, as Kate. The best drama takes place in the sound booth when Kate is interviewed for a podcast by an interviewer (Sean Cole) whose coldly pointed questions draw her to reveal what happened to her friends in the woods - though she retains the full truth which only we are allowed to witness. Harris-Butler's excellent performance is the backbone of the film as Kate wrestles with what her friend Amy did in those woods and what ultimately happens to Amy.

Though the pacing needs more pep, I admire director Sarah Lyons's feel for creepy images that unsettle the viewer and draw them into the story, and she definitely gets the best out of Harris-Butler as Kate, who convincingly shows her torment as she holds back a dark truth. I applaud Lyons's first film and look forward to whatever might follow this enjoyable venture into the dark things that lurk within us - and in the woods.

Despite the fact of never even having heard about this 2024 horror movie titled "The Woods", from writer and director Sarah Lyons, of course I opted to watch it here in 2025 as I had the opportunity to do so. I am a big fan of all things horror, after all.

Sarah Lyons wrote a script that was somewhat plagued by a slow and sluggish pacing. There simply wasn't enough of interesting things happening in the narrative, which ultimately made for a rather dull viewing experience.

I was not familiar with any actress or actor on the cast list, which was actually something that spoke in favor of the movie, as I do enjoy watching new and unfamiliar talents on the screen. The acting performances in "The Woods" were fair, despite the fact that the script was a sluggish bore.

"The Woods" is listed as a horror movie, which might be stretching it quite a bit. The only real horror here was how utterly boring and devoid of an interesting storyline the movie was.

The movie's cover over-sold the movie by a landslide.

My rating of "The Woods" lands on very, very generous three out of ten stars.