Review of The Woman (2011) by Kenneth D — 08 Oct 2011

After reviewing the general synopsis for this film I was under the impression to expect a to see an hour and a half of revenge and individual killings from the point-of-view of the woman, along with plenty of jumps, scares and suspence. What you actually end up with is a film that still manages to deliver without actually achieving any of the above.

If you are looking for something jumpy to watch with the lights out and give yourself a little scare then you would be equally as far out watching The Magic Roundabout. This film tries to focus more on the idea and concept of a messed up American family and their idea to re-educate a primitave woman (last of her tribe, so I read from the synopsis on IMDB) and bring up to date with modern day community. The majority of the film prefers to focus on characters around 'the woman', rather than the woman herself; a more fitting title could have been 'The Family'.

I was also in part bothered by the poor use of music during the film - too many minutes were made up of poor song choices popupating non-important situations. This film could have easily been 20 minutes shorter and give some time back for films that deliver more expecations.

Having said the above, dispite this film not being what I wanted on a Friday night, dispite me being able to comprehend why this is covered in the 'horror' catagory (the only reason I can think of it the wierd and sick concept of the film) it still kept me interested - and in all honesty, isn't that what you want from a film?

I spent the majority of this film wondering 'how is she going to escape', 'who is she going to kill' and 'how'. Although I must admit I was waiting for a long time for this to happen, there is a strange 'twist', if you can call it that, right towards the end of the film which shed some light to the background of why an American family would bother to kidnap a woman from the wild and tie her up.

Other good points of the film: the majority of the actors in this film (with great exception of the teacher) were fairly good and the two main male characters of the family were just a hate-worthy as you would want. The gore, when it happened, was exactly as I would want in a hammer horror film - in some part it reminded me of a toned-down Cannibal Holocaust. The ending - almost made it worth while.

In summary, although this film did not achieve what I was hoping, I would not feel good adding a 'rotten' rating as I was enticed all of the way through. I would say this is a solid film although I wouldn't bother going out of my way to watch this is something more interesting is on - probably better off with an evening of Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares!