Eden Lake

Uncomfortable "Shocker", 12 September 2008

Author: gary-444 from United Kingdom


*** This review may contain spoilers ***


Director James Watkins has made an unsettling debut in this "shocker" which skips around a few genres, and borrows from illustrious antecedents, in this stock tale of bad things happening to good people.Young couple Michael Fassbender playing Steve, and Kelly Reilly playing Jenny ,unwisely choose a weekend away in a remote park and pay for their mistake.

Some of this is stock formula; the pretty junior school teacher, the Sat Nav which urges them to "turn around",swimming in a cold English lake with their bags on the shoreline etc. However the film has aspirations for a bit more, with the antagonists being young feral children whose characters are allowed some development.

The posse of miscreants is led by a malevolent Jack O'Connell playing Brett who reprises the empty viciousness of "A Clockwork Orange" into a modern setting, borrowing heavily from "Lord Of The Flies" in his sadistic manipulation of his peers.The "strangers in a strange place" theme is not as convincingly dealt with as "Deliverance" and "Straw Dogs" achieve, but nevertheless, although both films are borrowed from, Watkins does create am idiosyncratic modern quirky English paranoia which taps into one of the concerns of the day - juvenile delinquency .

The very low budget is not at the expense of an intelligent script, and some convincing acting performances.But ironically, it's "realism" is to some extent its undoing.I left the cinema depressed and drained.The violence is not "stylised" it is real, there is not much room for suspension of disbelief. Although the plot twists groan a bit, no doubt around budgetary constraints, it's social realism touches Ken Loache's "Kess".This sets it apart from other stable mates, not least the recent American "Timber Falls" which starts from a similar premise.

The feral youth ARE placed in the context of brutish, amoral parenthood. The bloodbath is initiated by the "collateral" killing of Brett's pet Rottweiller which elicits more emotion from him than the torture of his victims.The moral ambiguity of right and wrong are explored gently when Steve finds himself inadvertently "breaking into" a house, and more savagely when Jenny kills a young teenager in her flight for help.Pointedly, the behaviour of the adults in the community is a sick cauldron for the behaviour which is unleashed.

I cannot say i enjoyed this film. Yet there is something undeniably powerful about it.Watkins deals with the personalities particularly well and I wonder if he has more to offer us than straight horror fare, I suspect the answer is yes.