Movie review - Nobody sleeps in the woods tonight (2020)

"Nobody sleeps in the woods tonight" is like an average iPhone. The only question is why in 2020 someone makes a counterfeit iPhone 4? The ambition to make a Polish horror film deserves recognition. Ambition to make a Polish slasher - Oh! Habemus papam! It is so rare for someone to slip between the border posts of the Polish Film Institute subsidies and the protective attitude of producers who are afraid of risk. And for this Bartosz M. Kowalski deserves applause.

But short applause. Because then you have to watch the movie. I sat down to watch with hope. This one is said to die last. This time, however, that was the first corpse - my hope died before the first character lost their life in the movie. I quickly realized that I was not watching the first Polish slasher, but the first slasher in which actors speak Polish ... I thought it would be much cheaper to dub the first US movie of this trend and remaster from VHS to 4K. Necessarily from the 90s, because Kowalski's film is at least 20 years late.

You can forgive the director for copying American clichés, calling this slasher an ode to his youth, a genre fan's dream come true, but one thing cannot be forgiven: that he copies all these cliches without reflection, without adding anything new. And it's not just that the species itself has gone light miles ahead from the point where Kowalski remembered it.

The fact that the director has no ambitions of any kind of redefinition of the genre is completely incomprehensible and seems like a wasted opportunity. I consider the biggest sin that the author did not filter the genre taken by us - no matter how we understand it. You can choose: through the Polish temperament, the Polish context... through anything that would make this film unique and possible to do only here and now.

This is original sin - a sin that makes all the other elements of the film pale; romantic photos, good actors, good make-up... The effort of so many people was already wasted at the start.

It is not true that Kowalski's film is the first Polish slasher. In Poland, productions in this genre have been created for years; at film festivals for young directors, interest groups in junior high schools, in the backyards - with cells... Only the scenarios and, what's unforgivable, quality of the special effects are often better there. Because the young people, reflecting off the works of culture, instinctively filter them through their sensitivity and temperament and reinterpret this already well-coordinated horror scheme to a better or worse extent. It is embarrassing that this is not done by an author who had a huge budget, a full-length feature debut, and a very good documentary behind him.

Apart from a missed opportunity, there is something equally sad about this story. These are good opinions from many critics. Ratings that (as is not common in the case of genre cinema) are higher than the ratings of viewers. What's sad about that? Because it says one thing: how patronizing some critics treat this (and not only this) genre. They don't want to apply professional assessment tools to it. It's disrespectful to this genre. Not smaller than Kowalski's film itself.

In "Nobody sleeps in the woods tonight", there was nothing Polish but the language. So we still don't have the first Polish slasher. And we are still waiting.
But if Kowalski's film will encourage other artists to create movies from this genre, it may be the only good thing caused by this production

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Thank you for reading,
@papi.mati