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Dark Woods (2003) aka Villmark – English Review

villmark bd

Stay away from the lake!

We follow a group that will try to strengthen team morale before they make a TV show. They will spend some days in a cabin far out in the woods, where they will get to know each other better. But they should have stayed away from the lake.

Dark Woods is the best Norwegian thriller I have seen. The formula is simple. A cabin trip far away from civilization, a scary lake, and a tent. It may sound boring, but Dark Woods is entertaining and very suspenseful, and Norwegian nature has never been scarier!

The movie is a kind of reinterpretation of the Norwegian classic, The Lake of the Dead (1958).

In the beginning, we get to know the characters. The annoying thing is that the actors have very little to work with due to the thin script. What demons does Gunnar have? What’s up with Lasse and his mother? Things are said that explain how the situation is for the individual characters in the movie. But I wanted to know more, and I felt that director Pål Øie was lazy with the character depth. The movie lasts only 80 minutes. But he could at least create some character depth!

The movie has two of Norway’s best actors in the lead roles. Neurotic Kristoffer Joner and the coolest, coldest man Norway has, Bjørn Floberg. The others are decent enough, none of the actors are terrible and the group dynamic is good. But it’s Kristoffer Joner and Bjørn Floberg who carry Dark Woods on their shoulders, and they do it well considering the half-empty script.

Bjørn Floberg is fantastic when he is cold and unstable. His character is just nasty. He has his inner demons, and he’s not the best group leader. It looks like he’s about to explode in several scenes, he’s completely out of control. It’s so lovely to watch Bjørn Floberg in Dark Woods!

As a viewer, you feel the isolation and the fear of seeing a red dress out in the woods. At first, it may seem as if Dark Woods is trying to trick the viewers into thinking this is a movie that plays on the supernatural, and it works with simple images and a piano score. Keeping it simple is often the best, and the atmosphere in Dark Woods is fantastic!

Dark Woods is a fantastic thriller, even if the script isn’t the best. It’s rare you experience the atmosphere Dark Woods creates. This is a wonderful thriller with a lot of suspense and turmoil. It has a partially open ending that can be interpreted in several ways, so to this day Dark Woods remains a somewhat mysterious movie. But then Dark Woods 2 was released, and it tries to give us some answers to what happened in the first movie. But did it succeed? I will give you the answer to that question soon.

Rating: 9/10

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