DEEP IN THE WOODS

Five young actors are invited to the castle by the owner, a certain Axel de Fersen, to stage the fairy tale of "Little Red Riding Hood" (a bit modified, to be honest) for the birthday of the autistic nephew, with whom the man lives with his gamekeeper and maid, who has gone to visit her sick niece. Meanwhile, in the area, the police are hunting a murderer rapist. Once the performance is over, the protagonists are decimated one after another by a mysterious killer wearing the mask of the Big Bad Wolf. The French once again demonstrate that they are light-years ahead of us: this "Promenons-nous dans les Bois" (original title, in the USA it was released as "Deep In The Woods") is a small gem of genre cinema, the type of film that we can no longer make in Italy. The story, in itself, is the classic American slasher, but what surprises is the realization: first of all, the director plays with the framing in an admirable way, creating scenes or even fragments of great ambiguity. In the same way, the characters, who never seem really defined, like two of the girls, apparently lesbians at first, except that we will then see one of them involved with one of the male protagonists. The erotic aspect is much more present than one might think, as throughout the film there hovers an aura of latent sexual tension, both hetero and homo. As for the purely horror aspect (which is what interests us the most), the debts to our Dario Argento are undeniable, especially in the murder in the bathroom filled with steam, or in that of the prologue. Similarly, the influence of Raimi is noted in the subjectives of a strange presence that lurks in the woods. This is one of the unclear points of the plot, already not very clear, because it proceeds by subtraction, a choice probably made to increase the level of discomfort. There are no really violent scenes, although the murders committed with nail guns and underwater rifles make their mark: it is not on the gore that one wants to focus the most. The jump-scare moments are also missing, because the atmosphere is strangely muffled by the photography and the many slow-motion scenes without sound. The focal point is the tension that builds between the protagonists, who slowly become little Red Riding Hoods chased by a monstrous Big Bad Wolf: the idea of being catapulted into a modern black fairy tale is more than an impression, just look at de Fersen's castle filmed in exteriors with the moon in the background, and masterpieces like "Suspiria" and "Phenomena" quickly come to mind. The masked killer, then, almost always filmed in the dark, is quite unsettling. Delplanque's technique is remarkable, and beyond the aforementioned references, he manages to create a rather personal style, positioning the camera at strange angles or in unusual points, such as the dashboard of a car. The zooms on the door holes are also beautiful. The solution to the riddle is not one of the most telegraphed, although, by elimination, it is the only possible one: quoting Conan Doyle, the unusual explanation is the right one. The only real flaw, perhaps, is the pyrotechnic ending, which comes straight from the idea of purifying fire so dear to the American tradition. In short, a film that the genre enthusiast cannot afford to ignore. It's a bit laughable (if not sad) that in France it had a huge success while in Italy, where it was released three years later, it passed practically unnoticed, with some cities (like my native Turin) not even covered: it is unfortunately symptomatic of our distribution system the refusal of anything that does not come from America.