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Tuesday, July 7, 2009

BD impressions: Eden Lake

12:05 PM / BD Impressions / 4 Comments

My copy of Eden Lake has a sticker on the cover proclaiming it to be "from the producer of The Descent". It really should have said "and the composer too", for David Julyan's bombastic score is the most prominent of many similarities between this, the directorial debut of James Watkins (who has written a number of British horror movies, among them the upcoming sequel to The Descent) and Neil Marshall's excellent 2005 tale of potholing gone wrong.

Eden Lake is a yarn in the grand "yuppies go into the wild and are set upon by local savages" tradition popularised by horror movies like I Spit on Your Grave, Deliverance and The Hills Have Eyes, the "savages" here being a group of nasty little adolescents who, in the space of a few hours, graduate from breaching the peace to grand theft auto before moving on to torture and murder. It's all very reactionary, as many horror movies tend to be: a sort of Daily Mail-fuelled middle-class nightmare. It's been pointed out by many, myself included, that these films are actually often morally aligned with the very people who would like to see them censored and banned. I don't recall there being a public outcry when Eden Lake was released, but then I suppose the gutter press and their ill-informed acolytes are too busy taking umbrage at the video games industry these days to pay any heed to a film that would probably have ended up on the DPP list had it been released in the mid-80s.

You see, Eden Lake is a nasty little film. True, Martyrs (which I watched the previous night) makes it look like a walk in the park, but it's a brutal and at times genuinely unsettling affair. And it would have been more so, were it not for the script's insistence on painting its heroine as a lily-livered drip and, in the final act, piling coincidence on top of preposterous coincidence to the extent that the whole thing collapses under its own weight and becomes unintentionally funny. The biggest problem by far is the supposed heroine, Jenny, who spends the first act skipping around like a small child, infuriatingly unaware of the dangerous situation she's so clearly getting into. Everything about her is intensely irritating, from her general demeanour right down to her voice and the clothes she wears. And, I'm sorry to say this, but the actress playing her, Kelly Reilly, even looks annoying. I recently saw her in an ITV adaptation of Lynda La Plante's novel Above Suspicion, and she was irritating in that too. While, in Eden Lake, she improves to an extent once the blood starts oozing, there's always something about her that feels unconvincing. Her character is also monumentally stupid, the low point being a sequence in which she spends a lengthy period of time hiding in the bushes while the gang of kids take turns stabbing her boyfriend. This goes on for ages, and it is only after every member of the gang has had a go with the knife that she decides to take out her mobile phone and try to get a signal.

Eden Lake is nicely shot, pacily edited and at times genuinely gripping. It's just a shame it's so god-damn reactionary. I'm not for a moment suggesting that there aren't kids like the ones depicted in the film: the problem is that their portrayal is so one-dimensional and cliché-ridden that it becomes borderline offensive. You can, I suppose, argue that the Texas Chain Saw Massacres of this world suffered from a similarly blinkered attitude. My response would probably be "That's no excuse." There's also the fact that these films seemed to be less an attack on a specific group of people and more a post-Vietnam reaction against bloodshed in general. The message of Eden Lake appears to be "If you go down to the woods today, beware of the murderous chavs."

By the way, the first episode of the current series of Casualty featured an actress called Finn Atkins as a sullen-faced chav who took great delight in filming people on the verge of death with her mobile phone and ended up being splatted by a speeding vehicle. In Eden Lake, she also plays a sullen-faced chav who takes great delight in filming people on the verge of death with her mobile phone and ends up being splatted by a speeding vehicle. Just to pile on the coincidences further, the episode of Casualty aired only a day after Eden Lake's UK theatrical release.

On to the disc, and here we have yet another BD with noticeably elevated blacks. I'm beginning to think this is some sort of global conspiracy designed to prevent me from becoming immersed in the movie-watching experience. Close-ups often appear strikingly crisp, but wider shots suffer from the tell-tale signs of low-pass filtering, creating ringing and reducing overall detail levels. (You can also spot prominent ringing around the letterbox bars at the top and bottom of the frame.) There are no obvious problems with compression, and it's really not a bad-looking disc at all, but the filtering and incorrect black levels make the overall presentation seem less than completely film-like. 8/10

Eden Lake
studio: Optimum; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 14.8 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 23.35 Mbit/sec

4 Comments

 
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