Eden Lake (2008)

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Despite appearances, it's not a horror film.

Director James Watkins

Stars Kelly Reilly, Michael Fassbender, Jack O’Connell

Things You Might Like

• Honestly couldn’t tell ya

Things You Might Not Like

• The fact it’s not a horror film
• Appalling acting
• Inconsistent pacing
• Chavs as the villains

Conclusion
Misses every single mark.

1 out of 5 Obnoxious Chavs

Jonathan David Lim

***

Woe! Woe to the white middle class! In such a world that is inhabited by union workers — and, of course, their children — life for the thirty-something graduate with a solid career path and a stable, romantic relationship can be a terrifying thing.

At least, that’s the attitude present in Eden Lake, a film so disgustingly class-oriented that writer-director James Watkins might as well have titled the film The Working Class and Their Children Are Full-On Evil. Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m not the type of guy to defend chavs, those irritating little shits who inhabit the streets of the UK and elsewhere. But they are not horror movie villains. And Eden Lake‘s first mistake is trying to pass itself off as a horror film.

The plot revolves around Jenny (Kelly Reilly), a schoolteacher, and Steve (Michael Fassbender), a nurse or a doctor or something (I can’t remember) who escape to the idyllic Eden Lake for a nice, relaxing weekend. While there, they encounter a group of chavs led by Brett (Jack O’Connell) who go out of their way to terrorize the poor rich folk. To put it in an American context for all my across-the-pond readers, it’s very much like Deliverance, wherein a men’s weekend away turns ugly when the group are terrorized by hillbillies — only in this instance, the hillbillies are all teenagers and the rich men can’t act.

Doesn’t sound much like a horror film, does it? Well, that’s because it’s a thriller, one of those bullshit film genres that mean high-concept stuff is meant to happen in the context of the ‘real world’, but requires you to suspend more disbelief than your standard horror flick. The guy who did ‘thrillers’ best was Hitchcock, and he presented his films as intense dramas, as opposed to horrors. No dicking around with genre conventions, just good filmmaking and storytelling. Whether you were scared and/or tantalized by violence didn’t matter, so long as you paid attention and left the film satisfied with its beginning, middle, and end.

Much like my aforementioned A Serbian Film, Eden Lake does a disservice to its proposed genre by taking it at face value, in that the director probably said, ‘People die and get tortured in horror films, right? That’s what makes it horror, right?’ He then proceeded to tell a story about a man who gets annoyed by a group of children, and instead of being a responsible adult, he (accidentally) stabs their dog and is subsequently tied to a tree stump with barbed wire because he couldn’t be bothered to contact the police.

It was at this point that I stopped watching. Now, this isn’t something I normally do. Most of the time, I’m able to bear a film all the way to the end, despite its badness, merely for the sake of critique. But I couldn’t for this one. The acting was so appalling, the pacing so inconsistent (there’s one inconsequential scene involving the couple’s campsite that could — and should — have been removed) that I could no longer stand it.

But beyond that, what really turned me off from this atrocity was the insistence on ‘real people’ as the movie’s monsters, rather than, say, monsters. The fun of horror movies is the idea that there are evil, rotting things out there willing to pounce at any given second. It’s a willing suspension of disbelief that allows people to sit through slashers and monster movies alike. It’s that something inhuman and unnatural about horror movie villains that maintain audiences.

However, when the villains are just a bunch of snot-nosed brats, then you no longer have the option to suspend disbelief. Watkins is practically insisting the audience agree with his assessment of lower-class youths, asking that we be just as afraid of chavs as he is.

What amount of good does this do for us as a society? By making real people the monsters in your film, you are saying that real people are monsters. And real people aren’t monsters. Dracula is a monster. Freddy Krueger is a monster. Chavs are little pricks with nothing better to do than make loud noises and harass passersby for their kebab and chips (as resident book guru Aaron Simon and I discovered one evening in Canterbury). They may do monstrous things from time to time, but it’s hardly any more monstrous than the dentist who rapes his patients while they’re under anesthesia, or the accountant who goes to work one day with a weapon and a chip on his shoulder. Nevertheless, Watkins chooses these upper-middle-class hotties to be the hero-victims of the lower-class uggos. And if that isn’t the definition of pure tripe, then I don’t know what is.

Don’t even bother buying Eden Lake on Amazon today, tomorrow, or ever.