Girl in Woods

Take a little walk in the Smokey's with a truly unsettled lady. That is the basics of Girl in Woods (2016).

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Grace suffers a mental deterioration while lost in the Smokey Mountains wilderness after her fiancé suffered a “gun mishap”. Experiences from her childhood emerge to confront her, made very real while she continues to remain in the woods by herself. It seems her father committed suicide and something dreadful happened to her mother as well. It also seems her mother was turning her against her father. She also recalls memories of her beloved grandpa and debates over survival with antagonistic and abusive personalities telling her to “take care of her hand”. Without her pills and not having her fiancé (Jeremy London) as an emotional stronghold, Grace is overcome by the “demons of the mind” (there is even this thing that growls, has darkened flesh, and appears a bit like an amphibian walking on two legs). Lots of wandering the woods and talking to “herself”, memories coming back and distorted, with Grace at odds with what is real and make believe. I want to re-iterate a lot of Grace alone in the woods suffering a mental breakdown. The location has its idyll and Juliet Reeves is quite good in a difficult part but this 90 minutes wore me down, breaking down my patience. It goes on and on, Grace and her deterioration. Eventually what she sees as a monster is in fact unfortunately tourists happening to pass through while Grace is in the midst. Basically we are privy to Grace’s decline and how she becomes this boogeyman haunting the woods. A deeply disturbed woman from the word go, and how this psychosis wasn’t reserved just for when she’s an adult; Grace and her time in the woods isn’t an easy film. Spending time with a mentally ill young woman throughout an entire film in the woods asks a lot of us. I think it wasn’t an altogether poorly made film but quite a bit frustrating. I just didn’t really want to spend this much time with her. John Still is her father, Charisma Carpenter her mother; their presence in her mind represents a great weight that certainly compounds Grace’s breakdown. Carpenter’s ghoulish spirit and the alternate personalities that pop up all influence Grace to commit very bad deeds. A news report about London’s fate tells us that Grace is quite far gone…