Review- Peacock And Crypt TV’s A Girl In The Woods Is An Intriguing Tale Of Monsters, Mysteries, and Colony Life

Sofia Bryant as Tasha, Misha Osherovich as Nolan, and Stefanie Scott as Carrie, photo courtesy of Distractify.

Starring Stefanie Scott as Carrie, a girl who runs away from the local forest-based cult to restart her life in West Pine, Oregon, The Girl In The Woods brings together an interesting story of monsters, dark age-old secretes, and the cult that protects  West Pine from being destroyed by both. It’s a complicated balance between responsibility, accountability, and ow that’s going to leave a mark.

The little cult in the woods known as The Disciples Of Dawn has access to a door that leads to the underworld (Gehenna) a place inhabited by monsters of nightmarish proportions. The cults main mission in life is to keep the monsters in the underworld, so much so they created a physical living space for a cult member who has been designated as a Guardian to live in the underworld and keep watch over the door in case an interloping monster tries to escape (there are hints late in the series that the cult has manufactured the angry minions of Hell so we’ll see.) If and when one tries to escape, it is the Guardian who must at all cost physically stop the monster from escaping even if they die doing so.

Let’s just say there’s a high turnover rate for that particular position.

He’s doing that thing again, isn’t he? Photo courtesy of Moviepilot

When Carrie makes it to West Pine to try and catch the next bus to Seattle, she meets and befriends local misfits Tasha and Nolan, a couple of high schoolers looking to make it big on TickToc and leave West Pine as soon as possible, who want to help get Carrie away from The Disciples Of Dawn. Things get deadly serious though when a member of the cult, Arthur (Will Yun Lee) begins to track Carrie through the town to catch her and bring her back to the cult around the same time as Nolan’s cousin Lumi (Lily Jane) comes up missing. Risking her safety, Carrie offers to stay a few days in West Pine to help look for Lumi, thinking that a monster from the door has escaped and captured the little girl. From here on out the story revolves around learning how the cult functions (there’s a lot of bloodletting, physical abuse, and self harm to keep everyone subservient) and Carrie’s role in it, the politics of keeping jobs in a small town that are destroying the quality of life in said town, and if the monsters are escaping how do they stop them. The more monsters that appear above ground, the more townspeople disappear, and yes, that’s a bad thing.

Lily Jane as Lumi, photo courtesy of Slash Film

All in all, the series is solid. There are a few plot holes in the storyline (Carrie getting her arm ripped off by a monster is something that should have been brought up between Tasha and Nolan being one of them) and the characters and dialog struggled with consistency (granted they are teens and are trying to figure things out but some interactions were weirdly out of place) but it’s still a really good series to invest your time into.

Official trailer can be seen here