Avis des critiques

It turned out Cabin was perhaps a little too high-concept. Not only forgetting to provide the basic thrills and catharses that make horror a primal, worthwhile genre when handled correctly, Cabin also too often had its cake and ate it too. In some ways it was overly easy on its viewers, giving them the images they crave, from violent deaths to a main character's exposed breasts, while also moralistically pointing its condemning finger at them a little too blatantly and insistently.

Avoiding parody (that old postmodern irony), the film becomes a surgical operation upon the subgenre – in which we locate the natural position of all its organs, and simultaneously experience the need to move them all around in a new configuration, so that blood can continue to flow through the organism.

Drew Goddard's The Cabin in the Woods rests on the cusp of something radical, coyly dangling between total self-awareness and genre indulgence, but not firmly landing on either. It's the reason the film is at once astronomically more fascinating and ambitious than most big-studio films and sadly unsuccessful in its goals when all the dust has settled.

While the scenes "downstairs" are often darkly funny, I feel like the idea would have worked better without them. Or maybe without the cabin, shown only from the puppeteers' perspective. Cutting back and forth between the two, as Whedon and Goddard opted to do, is the most conventional and least challenging option, and also a lot less fun—the film isn't anywhere near as WTF? as it ideally ought to have been, and actively squanders some of its best moments.