The Arborist

“Writer/Director Andrew Mudge got a world premiere for his second feature film, THE ARBORIST, at the Independent Film Festival Boston. This creepy, low-grade horror film is largely an examination of guilt and grief set at an isolated mansion in the middle of a forest. Mother and teen-aged son are hired by a strange older man to cut down some majestic pines for firewood. Mysterious pagan-costumed figures pop up mysteriously on the misty banks of the river. Hauntings, twisted realtionships, possession, murders, secrets all start to emerge in the latter half of the film.

The problem with THE ARBORIST? Well, the screenplay was pretty awful. When you’re writing a twisty horror film, you need to at least adhere to your own internal logic. There were too many elements that didn’t need to be there. The title is misleading — I had thought/hoped it might be a movie about a vengeful forest spirit angry at there treatment of the trees, but the forest was incidental to the plot — mainly window dressing. The acting was… rough, but I will blame that largely on the screenplay. Will Lyman, in particular, was given some really ridiculous things to say. The couple of things that were worth mentioning include the sound design, and the cinematography, which were both pretty good. Sadly, I was 5 minutes in when I started worrying that I wasn’t going to enjoy this film. 1 1/2 cats

“Screened at the Independent Film Festival Boston, Somerville Theatre”

Laks says: “THE ARBORIST is a film depicting a grieving mother and son are been hired by a recluse aristocratic wealthy man, seemingly at random to chop down trees in his manor which is of course secluded in the woods. This will be brief as I found the film to be an intolerable shallow mess of contrived narrative masquerading as something profound and intelligent but really it’s poor mish mash of overdone horror tropes. One didn’t even need to get too far into the film before one realises that even the Arborist, the so called titular character, has not shown any signs of caring or even interest in the beautiful woodlands, the story is set in and in fact is hired basically a tree surgeon. Thankfully the film has some wherewithal to at least acknowledge that the Arborist isn’t ‘Arboriting’ but that is where any semblance well thought-out writing stops. Half the crowd in the cinema snickered when we are given the first look at the ghost and the Arborist soon becomes almost two dimensional prop, mainly as a mechanical means to convey terribly shallow story of regret, grief and guilt that is drawn out with equally shallow characters, both dead and alive, prancing about the screen in mediocre folkloric costumes, spraying absolute gobshite lines, that barely says anything about anything. Even the fear and insecurities of the characters are disregarded, at times just chucked straight out the window before they are off canoeing by themselves, in between chopping tress about the place, to be only be revisited by yet another stupid bloody ghost wasting all of our bloody time. Can someone explain to me what is this farcical trope of handing down bloody hunting knives to your kids!? Dead Cat! (Please come haunt me to make up for all the crap genre films)

“World Premiere with Director Q&A (which I bloody didn’t stick around for) at IFF Boston.”\\\\