I was struck also by the complete absence of any erotic tension or fraternal friendliness between the guys and the girl even before the three fools are frightened out of their wits by strange wooden markers and burial mounds of carefully arranged stones.Īll the while I kept wondering why they started out on this silly project in the first place. The antifeminist-backlash spectacle of a pushy female leading two comparatively inoffensive males to be slaughtered by persons unknown and unseen gives the audience a ready-made scapegoat for the disaster. I’m willing to bet anything that if the movie had been simply about three guys lost in the woods, it wouldn’t have gone anywhere critically or commercially. Heather’s unsympathetic smugness from the outset, strangely, is what has made the movie such a big hit with audiences and critics. Her broadly supercilious tone makes it clear that she considers herself superior to everyone around her, and that includes Mike and Josh, whom she treats as her slow-witted slaves. You could tell from the early on-camera interviews she arranges with a variety of local yokels. Go back! But Heather, the bitch, was in no mood to listen.

I didn’t catch what exactly the two guys did in the way of technical functions, but they never seemed too impressed with Heather’s capabilities, which makes one wonder why they trusted her to lead them into an unknown forest, all three of them carrying backpacks so heavy and bulky that Hannibal would have hesitated loading them on his elephants when he was crossing the Alps toward Rome. Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard play Mike and Josh, Heather’s goofily surly helpmates. Thus Heather Donahue plays and is Heather, the domineering young woman director of the trio. In accordance with the coy nomenclature of this faux-found footage, the actors and the characters have the same first names.

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