Five young people borrow a mountain cabin from the cousin of one of them to spend a weekend of wild fun. Upon arrival, everything seems normal and the house welcoming, but someone is watching them through a closed-circuit camera system scattered throughout the building. This someone wants to push them into the basement at all costs, and when the five go down attracted by a trapdoor that suddenly opens, a long night of terror begins in which all the worst nightmares will become reality.
It is very difficult to talk about "That House in the Woods" to readers who potentially have not yet seen the film. The trailers say very little and seem aimed at confusing the viewers with the classic effect of "but what will this film be about?" and even the plot mentioned above is not at all explanatory. In fact, at first glance, it might seem like the usual film that follows the path of the teen slasher like "Friday the 13th" or the lesson taught by Sam Raimi with "The Evil Dead" and indeed the screenwriter and director Drew Goddard plays with these expectations and with a series of clichés aimed at winking at the passionate and often savvy viewer. Of course, "That House in the Woods" will not follow either the Raimi Evil Dead or serial killers with hockey masks, but it will turn into unimaginable territories building what some of my colleagues have defined, probably rightly, "the definitive horror film". It may seem exaggerated, but after seeing "That House in the Woods" it really is difficult to think of new directions that a horror film could take because Goddard has succeeded in the titanic task of putting everything, but an ALL-CAPS EVERYTHING, the history of horror in practice, into a fun and engaging miscellany that often leaves the viewer open-mouthed.
Think about what "Scream" was in 1996, a film that played with films to build its own specific personality. Well, "That House in the Woods" sets itself more or less a similar goal, excluding however the citationalism (at least not the direct one) and the metafilm component. Goddard's skill lies in filling his film with clichés (the five handsome young people including the virgin, the athlete, the easy blonde, the intellectual, and the stoner, the isolated and cursed place, the forest from which the threat comes, etc.) but using them for very specific purposes that are absolutely essential to the story (and all motivated!), thus transforming the clichés into full-fledged narrative elements. Even the threat that will haunt the protagonists is born from the unlikely banality of the horror imagination to transfiguring itself into a multitude of iconic imagery from genre cinema and literature. At a certain point in the story, when the basement trapdoor has opened and an arm has suddenly emerged from the ground outside the cabin, visually quoting "The Evil Dead", the cartridges of the deliberately already seen are exhausted and a real fair of the unpredictable begins that even manages to draw from the imagination of Clive Barker and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The cards on the table keep changing, and in particular the last 20-25 minutes of the film go in a direction that perhaps all of us as children imagined while fantasizing about the plots of our games, but that no one has ever dared to bring to the big screen.
Another point in favor of "That House in the Woods" is that it wanted to provide an alternative point of view on the story, which is not limited, therefore, to the five young horror stereotypes, but adds a group of "employees" who from the beginning contribute to confusing the viewer's ideas. This expedient helps to make the adventure of the five friends on vacation theoretical and at the same time participatory, thus moving once and for all the accusation of "usual film" that some viewer might move to "That House in the Woods" in the first minutes from the beginning.
Drew Goddard here makes his directorial debut with flair behind the camera, but his experience in the audiovisual field comes from writing cult series like "Buffy", "Alias", and especially "Lost" "from which perhaps some narrative influences can be seen", as well as the beautiful "Cloverfield". But in the "That House in the Woods" operation, which went into production several years ago and was delayed by the idea, later faded, of presenting the film in 3D, Joss Whedon, the father of "Buffy", "Firefly", and "Dollhouse", as well as the director of the Marvelian "The Avengers", also participates as co-screenwriter and producer. The cast alternates faces known to the public such as Richard Jenkins ("Blood Story"; "Liberal Arts") and Chris Hemsworth ("Star Trek"; "Thor") with unknowns (or almost) perfectly suitable for the roles, such as the delightful Kristen Connolly, the blonde who guarantees the dose of nudity Anna Hutchinson, and the stoned Fran Kranz. In a cameo appears Sigourney Weaver.
As you will have noticed, I have been very vague because talking about "That House in the Woods" without spoilers is really difficult. Know that Goddard has made a great film, absolutely well-written and with original ideas if not downright brilliant... and originality, in these times, is really the rarest primary good in cinema. "That House in the Woods" is a little manual on horror cinema in which with irony and above all intelligence it reflects on this type of cinema and on the narrative dynamics that it generates and from which it is generated. Not simple citationalism but sagacious elaboration of very broad narrative material, aimed at the creation of a fresh and engaging product. Surely it will set a precedent.
Must-see!
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"That House in the Woods" will be released in Italian cinemas on Friday, May 18.
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