like the forest outside my window

Rating: Null/10 (29 March 2003)

I watched this movie alone at home in living-room at the same time watching the totally dark suburb forest from my window without any living thing to be seen. I live upstairs of a condo with only two floors, hadn't heard any voices from downstairs and had the feeling the wall neighbours had gone out too, so I felt rather lonely. Before startin to watch the film I said to myself that I can manage without seeing it, I had anyway all kinds of things to do, a harmonious home-evening. But once I had started to watch it I couldn't stop. There I was again, in a same situation as years ago with Michael Mann's "Psychopath" (can't remember the correct name). The film's atmosphere thickened and thickened and I had to see it till the end (or so I thought). BUT...the last 5 or 7 minutes came in that terrible, evil house and at the point when the girl was screaming: MIKE, MIKE... I turned the TV off. I just didn't want to see some awful mutilated body or some loose head hangin from the ceiling. The other night I had seen nightmares and felt ill so the timing of this film was a bit wrong. Next day the first thing I did was to call my sister to tell how it ended.
I think the film is exceptionally well made considering many details. Personally I knew in the beginning it was not a document and in the very beginning of the film I was a bit irritated by the way the video camera was "handled" by a "clumsy" filmstudent, I thought it too obvious, like a fake to MAKE people believe it's a document which, I thought, possibly would have made me suspicious if I had watched it not knowing it was not one. But maybe this is after wisdom. A good horror movie, maybe a bit empty, anyway.