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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
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Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (12) | Top Critics (1) | Fresh (5) | Rotten (7)
No amount of shaky-cam footage or imaginative sound design can lend coherence to these improvised scenes, which were shot on location before being patched together in the editing room.
The build-up (visiting Stonehenge and driving past Dartmoor prison) is quite intriguing, much more so than the things going bump in the night.
The improvised performances of the cast, the beautiful yet isolated location and dynamic camerawork keep things watchable.
It's testament to the non-scariness of A Night in the Woods that it makes you want to go out and buy a tent.
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 ...
A few mildly effective scares, but all so derivative.
Its very Blair Witch-lite, serving up a thin smattering of urban legend with only a few scares towards the end.
Not a night to remember though.
Competent but not exactly original.
With skillful improv from the cast and some genuine frights, this is a worthy retread.
The inevitable ending offers nothing new on the Blair Witch template either which feels like scant reward for the effort required in reaching it.
There's plenty of atmosphere, but both the leads and the location deserve better.
"This is the path the horror fan must walk, this the path I have chosen. The path of watching a lot of not very good movies." A Night in the Woods doesn't just hit every cliche in the found footage genre, it does them bad too, like, really bad. Then, get ready to top it all off with: Absolutely no payoff whatsoever! Hurray! God I'm sick of found footage horror.
Super Reviewer
Yet another 'found footage' faux documentary, this one is so similar to The Blair Witch Project it's practically a remake. A boyfriend and girlfriend decide to go on a camping trip in Dartmoor along with a cousin with an apparent complicated 'history'. The woods they are staying in are purportedly full of ghosts/spirits/whatever (there's some 'vox pops' of people in a pub giving their versions, just like the local in BWP talk about the witch), and you betcha, there's some strange noises in them there woods. The spin with A Night In The Woods is that it appears at least one of the party are already a bit loopy and there's some interest in trying to determine if the strangeness that's happening is to do with things in the woods, things 'possessing' one or more of the three, or whether it's entirely down to human interference, or a combination. The film is well acted and has a couple of decent scares, but there's absolutely nothing new here and the 'found footage' sub-genre really is running out of new tricks. To top it off, the denouement is practically a re-hash of The Blair Witch Project (there's some beats similar to the 'figure standing in a corner looking at the wall' familiar from the closing moments) but doesn't have anything like that superior film's power. Not much worth bothering with then, sadly. I do like Scott McNairy though - he deserves better films.
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