In short: Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight (2020)

Original title: W lesie dzis nie zasnie nikt

It’s time for another round in the eternal fight between teenagers and cellar dwelling backwoods mutants. In Bartosz M. Kowalski’s Polish version of the tale, the teens are part of a techno-addict offline hiking camp, an idea the film doesn’t use for anything but to explain the absence of cell phones, though why someone leading a three day hike with a group of teens wouldn’t still have some way to contact the outside world is kept unexplained. The mutants are huge, and icky, smell bad and have just escaped their mum’s cellar. A bit of the old ultra-violence, Polish style, ensues.

While it’s more a competently made horror film than a deeply exciting one, Nobody Sleeps is at the very least entertaining throughout. It’s decently paced and effectively written, which is quite a bit more than most filmmakers believe they can get away with when making another backwoods slasher.

But then, there are a couple of elements here not completely typical for this sub-genre. Kowalski is pretty good at shifting the film’s tone repeatedly, and uses this to go from satire on the state of Poland (he doesn’t seem impressed), to bread and butter backwoods slasher stuff, to that very peculiar style of dark humour you often encounter in Polish films, and back again.

The film also has the interesting habit of dragging its teen characters back from being one note slasher movie clichés a scene or two before it kills them off, providing the young actors with a little bit to get their teeth in, and giving the curious impression of actually liking its characters (not a thing slashers do very often) yet still showing no compunction against getting rid of them with a nasty gore gag or two.

It’s certainly a mixture that does keep a viewer on their toes.