More Documentary than Film.

Rating: 8/10 (19 February 2005)

One of the reasons that people hated this movie i think was that they viewed it on the cinema screen, which considering that this was more of a documentary like experience than a piece of well thought out cinematography would hurt the movie in that it's true impact was sorely missed. If you want to see this film the right way, see it on a television screen, the way documentaries are supposed to be viewed, as a late night non-fictional documentary. I say non-fiction as this is the frame of mind the film wants you to think in, and this is it's main strength and why it must be seen as a documentary, not a piece of cinema. Knowing this then, you can throw away anguishes of bad acting, since most of the script was improvised and spontaneous, so it borders on the definitions of acting and a document of people's emotional journeys through frightful times. And by God, are they frightful. This is not a happy movie.
This film grips you into the myth of the Blair witch right from the start, with interviews with numerous towns folk sewing the tapestry that is the story by making creepy descriptions of sightings made and rumours of what really might be in the woods, that creates the foreboding aura that follows the three teens as they make their way into the feared woods. A line from a woman answering a question of whether she visits the woods at all after describing almost the entire myth as preposterous, "Oh I don't go up there ... no ..... I know enough not to go up there." really just sets the scene as to what these kids might be sticking their fingers into.
From there on in, it's an engaging, atmospheric, visceral and down right unnerving experience that never tells you everything but leaves enough on the screen to tell the tale of paranoia, terror and the overall deterioration of the human psyche under forces not known and never revealed to the eyes of the onlooker. You'll never look at the purpose of film the same way again.