Grim Fairy Tale

Kevin Bacon is Walter in Nicole Kassell's The Woodsman. Courtesy Odeon Films

The Woodsman looks like someone left the reels out in the sun too long. Colour seems to drop from people's faces as they speak, top to bottom, cartoon style. The streets are grey. The buildings are brown. The world is unwelcoming to most, but particularly to Walter (Kevin Bacon), a pedophile who rejoins the bleak cityscape after 12 years in prison.

With this colour scheme, as with so much else in this meticulous, near-fussy film, first-time director Nicole Kassell seems determined to circumvent criticism that she has made the unthinkable: a sympathetic portrait of a sex offender. She succeeds. The film often feels as punishing as the not-in-my-backyarders who stand in arms-crossed judgment of Walter.

Walter's apartment faces a school, one of the film's many improbabilities. Then again, the title is The Woodsman, and the townspeople have a Pied Piper-ish way of walking, so we're firmly in fairy tale territory (where are children more vulnerable than in a fairy tale?) despite Kassell's penchant for the neo-realist texture of '70s films like Five Easy Pieces.

Also unlikely, a local police officer (Mos Def) knocks on Walter's door for regular interrogations and humiliations but Walter's goal, as portrayed by Bacon – it's an internal, angry performance, and very good – is to vanish into the landscape. Should be easy: they're the same ashen colour. He locks his door at night as if he's keeping himself in instead of the world out.

Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon. Courtesy Odeon Films

Pleasure is dangerous territory for this guy, so he chooses denial, and Bacon plays him with self-loathing, eyes to the ground. It makes sense that Walter gets nervous when he meets a tough-talking co-worker (Bacon's real life wife, Kyra Sedgwick) at the lumberyard – Vickie drives a mean forklift – and they fall into bed, and later, a tentative romance. The sex scene, a jump-cutting riff on Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, is close to awful, and fascinating. Walter looks like a man consciously trying to normalize his own sexuality, and that's none too sexy. Vickie looks like a woman who's fought long and hard to enjoy herself, which bodes well for the couple; perhaps she's even strong enough to endure the truth of her lover's past.

The Woodsman, based on a play by Steven Fechter, benefits from the newness of its story: you probably haven't seen this movie before. With directors searching for the last taboo, there have been recent films about pedophilia – Happiness, Capturing the Friedmans, even Kinsey circles the subject – but none have been told exclusively from the perspective of the offender. And yet, The Woodsman seems very old-fashioned in comparison to these other movies: another man seeking redemption in a society that cast him out. The specifics of Walter's crime are frustratingly, dangerously secondary. Still, Bacon was smart to take the part, as the sheer ugliness of the character is very Oscar-friendly. Take that, Charlize; here comes the ultimate monster.

But despite its novelty, one is struck mostly by how The Woodsman is not a particularly special film, nor even very risky. And then that changes, suddenly and shockingly. In a pivotal scene, Walter follows a little girl through a woody park (swear to God, she's wearing a red cape, a symbol that works two ways: 1) are you kidding me? Could those hands be a little heavier? And 2) finally, some colour!), and in this remarkable encounter, we see why Walter's face is set in a perpetual twist; he's been holding himself in. He looks happier in the presence of this child than he ever does in bed with Vickie. Their encounter is a moment of blooming for Walter: his voice changes, his body relaxes. It's chilling, terrifying, and hugely dislocating for an audience that has been slowly gathering sympathy towards this outcast. Kassell, who spent much of the film wallowing in a spare, cinematic elegance, has shaken us back into the real world. It's a scene of great ambiguity, and horror, and the film, if not the man, is finally redeemed.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.