REVIEWED - THE WOODSMAN: Giving arguably the strongest performance of his career to date, Kevin Bacon draws a riveting portrait of a paedophile on a rocky road to redemption in this edgy, low-budget drama.

The Woodsman begins as Bacon's character, Walter, is released on supervised parole after serving 12 years in prison on charges of child molestation. Walter finds work at a lumberyard and an apartment located eerily close to a primary school. His brother-in-law (Benjamin Bratt) is the only member of his family who will speak to him anymore, and he is intimidated and hounded by his parole officer (Mos Def).

Determined to keep his head down and his past a secret, Walter remains an outsider in the outside world, shunning friendships at work until a plain-speaking forklift driver (Kyra Sedgwick) breaks through his defences.

The simmering drama is heightened by Walter's obsession with his past and the fear that he will re-offend, building a quietly, creepily powerful scene in which he encounters an 11-year-old girl in a park.

Director Nicole Kassel, a young film school graduate working on her first feature, treats this difficult material with remarkable sensitivity and assurance, and with such cinematic skill that the screenplay, which she wrote with playwright Steven Fechter, convincingly disguises its origins as a stage play.

The film is an honest and uncompromising character study of a man whose greatest enemy is himself, and Bacon, looking gaunt and with his face lined with hurt, responds to the material with a muted, subtle but hauntingly expressive portrayal. The tone of the film is in sync with his performance, quiet and measured, and it never attempts to sensationalise the difficult material at its core.