The Woods Are Real

Don't waste your time with this one. It sells itself as something else, has zero character development, random "unsettling" events that we're supposed to accept as mysterious or nefarious, and for what? There's no payoff. You waste your time waiting for an incredibly weak ending that is nothing more than someone's delirious mess of a sermon from their own personal mount.

Maybe you're the type who enjoys being pounced on with a surprise sermon, but it doesn't matter: you'll feel assaulted by an awful story with a paper thin plot, zero direction, and barely an ounce of imagination.

The god botherers should stick to trolling random social media threads if they can't even be honest about what they're selling.

Having seen that the director doesn't do bad films, I kept sitting through it hoping to be enthralled & entertained, but it never came.

I got to the halfway point before giving up.

The story upto where I aborted was, couple host party, guest wears cake, invites them to the woods, they goto the woods, get lost, bloke in a mask steapsbthe wife, bloke gets lost again, finda a friend, finds some birds who can sing, has something to eat with them, "Oh Good God, this is boring, abort abort".

So at that point I gave up & read a book about a bird who lived in her own in the Dales. It was riveting. Unlike this.

If I can watch an entire film, but don't enjoy it, I give it a 5 because I watched it all.

This film, though of a high production quality, I'd possibly have given lower than a 4, but because of the coin spent on it, it gets a solid Four.

The majority of high reviews are all accounts that were created 3 months ago, use generic names, and have only one review (this one). Coincidence? I think not. Beware the acclaim of those involved in production: they are but tooting their own horn.

Honestly, I couldn't even get past the opening scene. The acting is SO bad. Wooden performances of equally wooden dialogue. Not surprisingly, this is a "Christian movie" and like many of it's predecessors it values using actors of the faith over actually talented actors. I couldn't bear to slog through 65 more minutes of horrible acting so I turned it off.

It's true that not all horror films serve as mouthpieces for Christianity-there are even a few examples that condemn church leaders-but nearly any horror film that touches on the supernatural will either condemn the faithless ( The Conjuring, The Rite ), frame non-Jesus religions as spooky (The Wicker Man, The Exorcist, Sinister ), or claim that Biblical prophecy is coming to pass (Legion, The Omen). Even slasher films with no ties to religion often dabble in moralistic tropes against drugs, premarital sex, or doing anything the least bit salacious.

But this was a dull movie with no horror scenes. Simply horrible.

Check it out.

I'd say the vibe of this is more the speed of someone looking for more than blood, guts, violence. If I had to compare it to something recently, I think the Invitation or actually that film - it Comes at Night. It's not a virus spreading or anything like that - but it's sort of this contagion of faith the characters are going through. And have to get out by any means necessary.

Did you like Squid Game? This is actually more on that track. A survival test. Or The Game from the 90s with the dude from wall street. Took my son to this when it played a festival here in Washington. He's in his teens, brought his friend, they both thought it was cool as well. Which surprsied me, becuase it's not an "easy" movie.