Review of Eden Lake (2008) by Halfwelshman — 25 Feb 2012

Eden Lake's underlying message may be a bit Daily Mail, but it remains an extremely effective British horror film. It's tense, scary, and well-performed (particularly by Kelly Reilly and the terrifying Jack O'Connell).

Writer/director James Watkins skillfully contrasts the idyllic middle-class lifestyles of Jenny (Reilly) and Steve (Michael Fassbender) with the nightmarish wilderness in which they find themselves stranded and hunted by a gang of truly monstrous teenagers.

The whole film has a feeling of steadily building dread, which doesn't abate even when we reach the film's excellently terrifying finale. Even the idea of demonic teenagers as a credible threat in a horror film works, and all the better since unrest we witnessed in the UK last year.

Perhaps the film's beginning is a little too twee and drawn out, and you do find yourself feeling as though you're living inside a right-wing tabloid once the film really gets going. However, Eden Lake is just a horror film using British paranoia about unruly teeenagers to create something scary - it's not really endorsing the ridiculous sweeping statements about society that tabloids are often guilty of making.

As a horror film, it succeeds - it's scary, it's tense, it's gruesome, and it's got a classic horror movie structure - city dwellers go to the country and have to fight for survival when they encounter some nasty locals - it's pure Texas Chainsaw Massacre! As a social commentary, you can't take it too seriously, but then again, I doubt that's what James Watkins ever intended his film to be.