Finding a flicker of humanity

There hasn't been a better, or a braver, performance this year than Kevin Bacon's portrait of a paedophile in Nicole Kassell's The Woodsman. Just out of prison, returning to his home town, the strength of his portrait is such that, without seeming to angle for it, he gains our sympathy.

The film poses a few questions. Why, for instance, does the convicted paedophile insist on going home to horrified relations and acquaintances? Why is he allowed to rent a flat opposite a school playground? There are other moments in this carefully made study when the plotline partially pushes us towards a hopeful conclusion, though to give away more would spoil this unnerving study of compulsion.

Bacon shows that not all paedophiles are monsters, even if they have committed a monstrous crime. The film demonstrates how society often does its best to prevent their rehabilitation.

A girl at work (hip-hop star Eve) first flirts with him and then, discovering from the internet why he has refused her, tells his workmates at the lumberyard; a detective (Mos Def) tells him he's scum and tails him throughout. The scenes when the returnee faces his compulsion, in particular with a sad little girl he finds bird-watching in the woods, are handled without prurience and with considerable sensitivity. No one should expect that this quiet, understated film will attract the wrong sort of audience.

A fine, toughly resonant support performance-comes from Kyra Sedgwick as the woman who befriends him and guesses he has a secret even more terrible than her own - she had sex with her brothers as a young girl and made a similar mess of her emotional life.

Nicole Kassell based her film on Steven Fechter's play of the same name, and opens it out with some reference to films of the early Seventies such as Five Easy Pieces and The Getaway. Her debut contains in its 87 minutes more than most two hour and over epics ever attempt to tell us. Its message is that while some paedophiles are beyond help, there are also others who need help and cannot get it because we fail to imagine that there is a flicker of humanity within them.

The Woodsman
Cert: cert15