A young married couple moves to a cabin in the woods to cope with the wife's losing battle against terminal cancer.  The husband, Henry (John Muscarnero), loves his wife Susan (Tracy Coogan) dearly, but because of the situation and lack of "relations" has been feeling somewhat distant from her, and yet still loves her and clings tightly to her as he takes care of her every need in what very well could be her final days.

The night they arrived at the cabin however, things started taking a turn for the worse.  A scraggly local man enters the home and gropes Susan as she lays helplessly on the couch.  Henry confronts him with a fireplace poker and the man runs off.  The local sheriff (James Russo) shows up to take the report, but can't do much about it because of a lack of evidence, though he knows from the description that it's a local man who lives nearby.

Later on, Henry is out for a jog and sees the same man sexually assaulting a girl by the lake.  Again he drives the man off and take the girl, Alicia (Mary Kate Wiles), back to his cabin.  Again the sheriff is called, and they start looking for the guy (who turns out to be the girl's uncle apparently), but the sheriff has to go out of town for some dealings with another case, so he asks Henry if the girl can stay with them for a few days and Henry agrees, which in hindsight, was probably a big mistake.

See, Alicia is a bit unbalanced to say the least, and starts becoming obsessed with the couple, and increasingly jealous of Henry's wife Susan.  Henry, for his part, obviously has desires for the girl but struggles to control it as he obviously feels massive amounts of guilt about it.  Eventually however, things come to a head, and when Susan goes nuts and attacks Alicia, trying to kill her out by the lake, Henry rescues her and ends up suffocating his wife to finally put an end to her illness and suffering.  Once she's gone, Henry, in his grief, turns the love he felt for his wife to Alicia, and just as they were about to consummate their relationship, the sheriff shows up with a social services lady and they take her away to live with some cousin in Los Angeles.  It's then that Henry learns that the girl is actually only thirteen years old.  You can pretty much guess his reaction.  The sheriff appeared to see what was going on, but didn't really say anything about it.  The end.

Ok, now for the review part...

This film is very professional and polished looking.  Visually it's extremely well shot, the sound is great, its pacing is somewhat slow at times, but other than that it's really well made.

As far as the acting goes, there's not a bad performance in this film.  The entire cast was great, however, that doesn't mean their characters were well written, which I'll get to in a minute.  Tracy Coogan did a really good job showing the weakness of someone stricken with cancer, John Muscarnero was equally great as the loving husband who just wanted his wife to be ok so they could have their life back.  Mary Kate Wiles brought a strangely psychotic feel to her character that really made you wonder at all times what she was going to do next, what she was feeling and what her motives were.

However, as I said, there were things about this film that either didn't make sense or could have been changed to have worked better within the context of the story.

The first thing that really hit me was when Henry walks in on the guy groping his wife.  He sees it through the window and runs back in with the fire poker in his hand...and he just stands there...just a short distance away, yelling at the guy to leave his wife alone and to get out.  Yeah, that's right, I said yelling at the guy.  Now any guy I know, even the biggest wuss in the world, if they really loved their wife and had a fire poker in their hand and saw some guy groping their cancer stricken wife, would have just ran the three or four steps and brained the guy.  Seriously, I was sitting there wondering why this guy wasn't doing anything but yelling.  If it was me, that guy would have been dead before he could even blink.  I know they needed him alive for the next plot element to happen, but jeez, they could have at least had him attack the guy and hit him a few times before the guy ran off.

Then after all this happens, they don't even leave the freakin' cabin!  I would have gotten my wife out of there ASAP and took her back home.  Hell, the next day Henry even goes out jogging!  Excuse me?  Your cancer stricken wife gets attacked my some scraggly haired freak and the very next day you leave her home alone and go out for a jog?  All I could think was, "What the hell is the matter with you???"

There was a point to the jog though, since it was on that jog that he found the guy attacking Alicia by the lake, and that's how Alicia entered into the story.  Honestly a better way for her to have entered the story that would have made more sense was for her to get attacked and then she gets away somehow and runs to their cabin for help.  At least that would have made more sense.

Something else that didn't make much sense was that Susan had been in the hospital prior to all this being treated for her cancer, and yet she still had all her hair.  I'm not really up on all the different treatments for cancer, but generally when you see people with terminal cancer, they've had chemo therapy and radiation and such and have at least some hair loss.  She apparently had a type of cancer that some people have recovered from, so there was a chance, which leads me to believe they'd have been aggressively treating it.  Tracy Coogan did play the part really well though, showing the kind of weakness that a cancer victim would have after radiation treatments and such.  Still, there's a scene of her running through the woods that seemed rather strange for someone who was supposed to be so weak, and the whole thing with her attacking Alicia, well that was totally incongruent with the supposed weakness of condition.  Still, this wasn't Tracy's fault.  It's just how it was written.

The other thing that bothered me was how the crazy guy who was basically the catalyst for the entire situation, simply just disappeared from the story after the incident with the girl.  Having him continually showing up and terrorizing them all would have led to a much more tense and suspenseful story, but he basically just disappeared and was hardly mentioned after the incident at the lake, which in my opinion, was a wasted opportunity.

All in all, despite various problems with the story and such, this still was a pretty decent thriller with great acting and a lot of suspense, mostly revolving around Alicia.  The character was so unbalanced, you didn't really know what to expect next, and that's what made the movie work for me on the whole as a thriller.  While the pacing is a bit slow, it does actually work well in the sense that it builds the proper tension around her character.

If you like a good suspenseful thriller, you'll definitely want to check out this film.  If you're not the suspenseful thriller type, you'll probably still enjoy it, but you may find the pacing a bit slow for your tastes.

If you'd like to find out more about this film, you can check out the trailer at http://www.darkwoodsmovie.com, and the official Facebook page for the film here.