Hal Kitchen
A familiar exploration of grief that in its way borrows heavily from some of its contemporaries, Woodland Grey is a slow-burn psychological mystery that displays a fair amount of rewarding narrative subtlety, but which is, I think hampered by its indirect and constricted approach to storytelling. The film follows Emily (Jenny Raven), a young woman who recently lost her Vietnam veteran grandfather—a brief appearance from horror icon Art Hindle (of The Brood and Black Christmas)—and who goes camping alone to collect her thoughts. While out there though, she falls and injures herself, and is saved by William (Ryan Blakely) who has been living a purgatorial existence off the grid while battling his own demons.
My initial criticism of the film is I think the film’s first act is told in the wrong order. We get a prologue establishing events from William’s perspective before we flashback to begin Emily’s story when the film probably would’ve been more interesting if told from her perspective. Arriving in the woods without any setup of the mysterious nature of William’s behaviour, the audience could have seen it from the outside and put the pieces together at the same pace that Emily does. She is the protagonist and this structuring choice does dispel the immersion in her priorities that the first act is required to establish. It’s difficult to invest in her grief at the loss of her grandfather when a) we know so little about either of them, with just one scene with either character before she sets off into the woods, and b) when we know there’s spooky stuff going on with Will out in the wilderness.
This approach to structure is occasionally mirrored in the more momentary storytelling, with the moment Emily discovers her granddad’s body played out behind closed doors. Giving us a more traditional, linear narrative with more time devoted to establishing Emily’s character would’ve benefited the story immeasurably. As it is, Woodland Grey is obtuse without being subtle.
It’s a shame because there’s some real promise in the story that writer-director Adam Reider was trying to tell here. I actually think the concept he’s working with is bordering on brilliant, but it just needed more polishing before it was ready to shine. It bears a lot of similarity to the recent release Tethered, which also opens with a lone individual, living hand to mouth in the woods while in some way taking care of a mysterious entity chained up at the ends of their property. Woodland Grey is perhaps a more satisfying experience overall, but I can’t deny that Tethered was taking more risks with its story.
The film’s a virtual two-hander between Raven and Blakely, and they both give uneven performances, sometimes delivering their lines with effective conviction and eccentricity, at others, just not quite making the dialogue ring out properly. Meanwhile, some of Reider’s direction choices suggest a desire to tell the story in a traditionally immersive way, while others create more of a distracted and dreamlike feel. A more original and bold take of the look and tone of the film would’ve done more I think to preserve the psychological complexity of the ideas being put into it at the creative end. As it is, it’s hard to get invested in the film’s exploration of grief when it doesn’t sink its claws into you on a character level, nor present an exhilarating take on its aesthetics.
There is definitely some real promise here, but I fear the means may not have met the ambition with this one. It has some strong ideas but the overall package gives little reason to choose it over the many alternatives, even if some of the future careers here might bear attention.
