cowfish

I’ve never actually described myself as a blogger, but in my head I occasionally think I am. I used one of those moments of clarity to give Annie Mole a shout and got myself to a blogger’s screening of new film Eden Lake last night. Very exciting, a real film screening in a little room with people sticking their oversized afros in front of the projector and EVERYTHING. We even had some screening vets at the back, who complained about the difficulty of finding the right door to get into the screening rooms in Hammersmith and how The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is meant to be a mildly contemptible Disneyfied holocaust movie. I also managed to sit under a dripping air-conditioner during the Q&A after the movie, while hunting for a good photographic angle, which is the first case of mystery moisture while sitting inside that I’ve had for a while.

The film is a nasty piece of homegrown british horror, with a couple of jumps, a lot of running through woods and some nasty kids who like torture and murder – just what you want for a Monday evening. I like the scrungey horror movie (to use the words of St Mark of Kermode) and after seeing This is England I was definitely up for seeing something else with Thomas Turgoose, the rather excellent young lead in that film.

The story revolves around a slightly smug couple who go camping in the countryside, as so many people foolishly do, to spend a nice weekend beside a lake that will shortly be redeveloped into a gated community. They meet the local kids and hilarity ensues. It’s nothing particularly new, but it’s pretty well executed, with a lot of horror cliches sitting alongside occasionally beautiful shots and a couple of bits of shonky acting.

Mr Turgoose, who seems to now have become one of the selling points of the film, has a tiny but important part and doesn’t do much, so don’t go and see it just for him. However, the leader of the pack of kids, Brett (played by Jack O’Connell) is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, who fills his role quite nicely. The film looks quite pretty, with some rather good makeup effects, although every now and again I was dropped out of the story by little things – a dodgy switch between a stunt driver and a kid, an overly loud swell of music, an out of place sound effect and aerial shots (that we found were filmed after the close of principal shooting) that didn’t quite fit in with the preceeding ones.

James Watkins – Writer and Director

The subject matter of the film is quite interesting though. It walks a fine line between making a point about the fear of youth and just being a violent british chase movie – I think it comes down just about in the middle. During the Q&A after the showing, the writer/director, James Watkins, mentioned one specific scene which leans towards Michael Haneke’s Funny Games style of film making – showing the scenes of violence that the audience want and then turning it back on them, showing them that maybe that’s not what they really wanted after all. It doesn’t go as far as Haneke’s film, which I’ve been told is an hour and a half lecture on why you, the watcher, are a bad person who should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves, but it does bring up this point, as well as others – the often cliched violent families breeding violent kids, the moral ambiguity (a phrase that came up a lot) of both violent children and the condescending middle classes, even a hint of the perils of gated communities and green belt development.

All in all it was an okay movie – not one that you can really say that you enjoyed, but one that you might sit down and have a think about afterwards. It’s british horror at its most ‘chasey-through-the-woods’, with a hint of exploitation, a few bits to make you think and an ending that means you won’t be skipping down the road afterwards – you already know if you’ll like that kind of thing and if you do then you’re probably already planning on going to see it, I certainly was.

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