A very good film that might have been better...

Rating: 8/10 (4 August 1999)

Before anything else, let me say that I liked the film. Nice concept. Well executed. In particular, I appreciate that the film makers leave the central enigma of the movie intact. Peter Weir's in "Picnic at Hanging Rock" makes a similar choice. It takes strength of character and confidence to make this kind of choice. It speaks reams about their potential.
Already a thing of talk among independent filmfolk long before it hit theaters, BWP had poked itself into my consciousness a year or so ago. The buzz. The buzz! A website before it was a film. The website, itself, less a billboard than a computer game. The lore: Really cheaply made -- 60 grand, 25 grand, 10 grand! for crineoutloud -- the whole thing improved in the woods in eight wet and stinky days; they gave a trio of actors a couple of cameras and a DAT, led them on a scavenger hunt for clues, left sketchy notes and mind-screwed the cast into near-real fear and panic and late night woodland snipe-hunts. It was all so hip, so coolly generated, so clever. Forget that it had been done before. Forget "Cannibal Holocaust," and others...this one had integrity and a kind of kick-ass honesty about it. Just following all the material about the film before it opened, you just knew that -- if successful -- it was going to be one of those demiurge filmevents that redefined the business and would spawn a thousand mini-urges flailing for a ride.
The buzz and hype! And it's all true. There it is: kind of lovely and clever. It HAS integrity. You like those three people. You buy their weaknesses and still you like them because they're weak like you are weak. They're jerks, but still you like them because they're jerks like all of us.
The actors are good, the self-revelatory stuff is honest -- forget how they did it. (John Ford gave Victor McLaglen the next day off and got him drunk as a skunk the night before the big trial scene in "The Informer." Crack of day the next day, Ford dragged McLaglen out of bed and shoved him in front of the camera. Sleep-stupid and whisky-blubbering, fuzz-gargling his lines, shaking all outside and in, McLaglen acted his way through the day and earned an OscarÂ™ for his hangover.)
So there! Who cares how they got there, they got there!
And there it was. The personal hype machine worked well for these guys, the short booking worked for them boosting their per screen opening to stratospheric levels. Great.
I still went in thinking the movie was going to be just okay. It was better. It was very good. They might have done a little more with the sound. They might have built the tension a little more. They might have paced it better. They might have... They could have-should have...
Well. It worked.
I will say: I came out of the theater not frightened but moved. I left the theater more impressed with the film makers than their film. Ah, phooey! It was a good night out.
It is, finally, a very good film that could have been better.