Heather Donahue

In The Blair Witch Project (1999), Heather Donahue sounds like someone who has not had time to think of a better way of saying something. With Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams, she makes the improvised dialogue awkward and increasingly unpleasant, as though each exchange were making it harder for anyone to think clearly. We were unsettled by the way these three people kept frightening one another, quite apart from anything that might be in the woods. Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez get performances that make fear look difficult to manage rather than carefully rehearsed. Donahue is willing to sound unreasonable, and the film needs that willingness.

She was selected for her improvisational skills, and that ability matters more here than any single display of distress. The rough images could only do so much if the people in them sounded as though they were waiting for their cues. Some critics found her character annoying or her acting uneven; we think the irritation is largely what makes the performance credible. There is a limit, and a few exchanges repeat the same panic after we have understood how frightened everyone is. We would cut those repetitions, but asking Donahue to make her character more agreeable would take away something the film needs.

The subsequent career moved through smaller films and television, under the constraint of typecasting. She played Megan in Boys and Girls (2000), Whit in Seven and a Match (2001) and adult Mary Crawford in the science-fiction miniseries Taken (2002). She retired from acting in 2008, leaving a body of work still heavily associated with the part that used her own name. We would not pretend that one performance tells us everything she might have done with different opportunities. Return to The Blair Witch Project for an actor prepared to let panic be tiresome as well as frightening.