The Cabin in the Woods, review - Telegraph.co.uk

Memento, The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense and all had final-reel secrets that weren’t just worth discovering â€" they were worth keeping secret afterwards, too. Like all of the best thriller traditions, this can be traced back to Hitchcock: adverts for Psycho implored prospective viewers: “Please do not give away the ending â€" it’s the only one we have.” Pulp auteurs Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s uproarious detonation of the horror genre, The Cabin In The Woods, fits squarely into this category. The film flits between two very different realities: one recognisably film-like, the other just as recognisably mundane. The film’s big, unrevealable secret is the nature of the contrapuntal relationship between the two.

Then, there are five stereotypical teenagers â€" suspiciously stereotypical teenagers, played by Kristen Connolly, Anna Hutchison, Chris Hemsworth, Jesse Williams and Fran Kranz â€" driving to a remote cabin for a weekend break. When they arrive, the bunker employees set to work, ands what follows isn’t so much a horror film in itself as a fiendishly clever genre autopsy.

In the same way that Scream winkingly riffed on the slasher film template, The Cabin In The Woods is aimed at audiences who are already familiar with haunted house movies, and wry nods to The Evil Dead, Ringu, Hellraiser and A Tale Of Two Sisters, among many others, will delight fanatics. But it’s also admirably reflective, and readily questions the horror film industry’s ritualistic obsession with certain genre tropes. What is it about American high-schoolers that makes people want to watch them being devoured and dismembered?

With a little adjustment, The Cabin In The Woods could have been a pulp Funny Games; Michael Haneke’s blistering indictment of violence and voyeurism. But when Whedon and Goddard finally do bring the worlds of the bunker and the cabin together, analysis is jettisoned for pure entertainment. But that’s as much as can be said on the subject of the ending. It is, remember, the only one they have.