Cast: Kelly Reilly, Michael Fassbender

Director: James Watkins

Screenplay: James Watkins

Running time: 1 hr 31 mins

Genre: Horror



CRITIQUE:


The histrionics of the Brit horror Eden Lake treads familiar territory. A dashing Londoner couple goes for a holiday trip down a beautiful lake surrounded by woodlands. Their skin-dipping is disturbed by a local gang of youths, and what was supposed to be a starry-eyed romantic weekend turns out to be a knife-toting nightmare. Of course, in the slasher flick genre, all goes wrong, characters are tortured, and damsels run like in a marathon. It feels like we’ve seen it before in common American horror fare – but what then makes Eden Lake so bloody terrifying to watch? Perhaps because of its Britishness. First time director James Watkins winds the suspense control to full amplification and creates the torturers so disturbingly believable, the ones that you see wearing hoods in your streets. Call them chavs or hoodies, never has a film been an indictment towards the nation’s teenage and knife culture since Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Easy watchers will find themselves visually battered, as flesh is cut, blood is spilled. But it doesn’t hurt one’s intelligence either; there are twists in the plot and smart orchestration of violence. Here violence is not gratuituous and unnecessary, it comes in abrupt shock. One certain scene shows the heroine enraged and starts to fight back, and inadvertently kills a person who’s willing to help. The performances by Kelly Reilly and Hunger’s Michael Fassbender (whose face now suddenly turns up in many British films of late) are of a visceral level that it requires them to be tortured, stabbed, mud-covered and blood-soaked. The teenagers of this film are as convincing as they could be, and comes the film’s ending – so dismal and bleak, and morally unpleasant, that it points a big, sullen finger to the adults, the parents, for being the cause of malignance of their children.


VERDICT:

Gut-wrenchingly good. Eden Lake is so harrowing, nightmarish, bitter and disturbing that it leaves a metallic tang in your mouth. This is 2008’s horror event.



RATING: B+