The Woods
2018 · 4m
Directed by Robbie Lemieux
Genres: experimental, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A little girl plays alone in a garden while something unsaid moves at the edges of the frame, in a four-minute horror told through frames and silences.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Four minutes of a kid in a garden with something lurking at the edge—it's the kind of restraint that actually bores me, because the premise does all the work and Lemieux just lets it sit there. I wanted the film to *snap* the contract, to make me regret wanting the unsaid to stay unsaid.
Lemieux understands that horror lives in what you don't show, and the editing—those careful frames, the rhythm of the silences—recalls the best of folk-horror tradition without genuflecting to it; this is a film that knows exactly what it owes to the lineage and what it's allowed to withhold.
The real choice here is the sound design—or the absence of it—which turns the garden into a listening space rather than a looking space, and that single decision rescues what could have been a familiar premise into something that feels genuinely disquieting on four minutes and presumably a budget that required shooting in natural light.
Reviews
It is Ravichandran's cinematography that forms the heart of the film, with every frame and shot perfectly timed. The film is beautifully crafted and with its open ending, leaves more questions than answers.