Convoluted, confusing, hard to follow, unnecessarily mysterious
I found THE TIMBER unnecessarily convoluted, confusing, and difficult to follow. The screenwriter and the director tried to spin a mysterious, Old West yarn that bordered on the horror genre but ended up spinning out of control into the incomprehensible. That's a shame because the movie could have been better. I loved the wintry country and mountain scenes, which must have accurately depicted the American Mountain states in the winters of the 1870s and the 1880s. Historical records show that the winters of that time period were especially harsh-artic frigid, whiteout blizzards, immense deep snowdrifts, and incredible suffering by man and beast-compared to the milder winters of the 21st century that produce minimal snow and less harsh sub-zero temperatures so that the beautiful wintry countryside scenes don't appear any more. But all that was wasted on a movie that tried to too hard to be artsy and mysterious but ended up a pretentious muddle.
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