Oh my. I can’t remember the last horror I watched that left sickening butterflies in my stomach. One that left me wondering about it for hours, even the following day. One that made my brain spin in all sorts of directions. Well done, Eden Lake, you went and did it, didn’t you?
The film boasts an impressive cast starring the slightly less famous than what he is now Michael Fassbender, current rising star Jack O’Connell and the ever-strong and underrated Kelly Reilly as well as a host of familiar faces on the British film scene.
Steve (Fassbender) takes his primary school teacher girlfriend, Jenny (Reilly) away for the weekend on a surprise trip in the hope of proposing to her. Eden Lake is their destination, a mini-paradise sort of place in the English countryside. While there, they have a small dispute (nothing more) with a group of teenagers for being loud. Brett (O’Connell) reacts how every other teenager leading a gang would react, he get mouthy with Steve, and that’s really about it. When Steve realises they’ve popped one of the tyres to his jeep though, he’s annoyed and sets about finding them to give them a piece of his mind. Jenny convinces him to relax and enjoy their weekend, but as the sweet couple and hooded gang continue to come together, things escalate to unimaginable levels.
This film really is as good as the the hype and yet still finds room to be surprisingly good after that too. You get a genuine sense that this is life or death and the clock is ticking. Brett and his gang know they’ve come too far now, they’ve got to finish what they started and Jenny and Steve need to get out of the woods to get help. It’s important to remember this is James Watkins‘ directorial debut, and what a fine job he did. He doesn’t just walk into the room of horror, chest pumped. He kicks the door off its hinges, and it’s not surprising to see that he has gone on to do the impressive Woman In Black since. Remember the name, James Watkins.
Eden Lake takes a very serious issue, that at the time (2008) begun to become a major concern over the UK, the rising problem of yob culture. Around the time the press singled out a few high profile cases of young gangs, ordinary teenagers hanging out in groups attacking people. Sometimes other gangs, more shockingly sometimes couples, fathers and mothers, just for walking by at the wrong time, or simply asking them to be a bit quieter outside their house. I could write a dissertation on Eden Lake. I could write an entire character study on Brett alone. This is the sort of cinematic character you could and should look so much further into than what you get on face value. I could denounce the critics who condemn this film for being an incitement to class prejudice against the working class in Britain, because unless you’ve lived it and unless you were neighbours with these characters, went to school with these characters, were apart of the same gang as these characters, you cannot condemn it. Eden Lake, for me, is pretty damn accurate as far as the characters involved go. It’s genuinely terrifying to know this gang mentality (on extreme, rare occasions) can happen, these characters are very real. And that’s the terror in which Watkins builds his story around.
This is not a horror in the traditional sense. Most of the action takes place during the daytime, changing the theory that evil hides in the shadows. This film makes you question society and how we got to where we’re at. It’s a genuine look at the world we live in right now. It has authentic terror, a real life horror that continues once the film stops and that’s the scariest part of all. Eden Lake is a rare horror that asks as many questions as it does scares. It challenges the culture which we live in. Not just that of the yob-culture, but the culture in which parents, schools and communities have to share the blame. Kids don’t just become hostile, violent and evil. Of course there have always been problems like this in every community of every town/city in every country and yes Eden Lake goes to the extremes, but it’s refreshing to see a horror that asks these kind of questions of its audience.
The film’s shock value continues to sky rocket and you’re not really sure how much more you can take by the end. Some may hate the ending, I’m torn myself, but you can’t argue that it was the ending that needed to happen to be consistent with the message of the film.
Rating: Eden Lake has just set the bar impossibly high providing a dark, sinister and terrifyingly real story. For ninety-one minutes, it made the horror genre superb again, (8.3/10).
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