Cinema review
Directed by James Watkins
Starring Michael Fassbender, Kelly Reilly, Thomas Turgoose, Bronson Webb
Release date Out now

A couple head off for a romantic weekend to the picturesque Eden Lake and find themselves terrorised by a group of vicious chavs…

It’s a neat enough idea: a survival horror/torture porn featuring ‘hoodie’ thugs ripped straight from the screaming headlines of The Daily Mail. But the dangers are obvious – how do you portray a world of bad behaviour and happy slapping without it appearing ridiculous and cartoonish? Sadly, it’s a problem that Eden Lake never manages to overcome, and both the vernacular and the behaviour of the kids here never feels real; you almost feel it might have worked better had it been played tongue-in-cheek. And considering that the ‘hoodie’ stereotype beloved of the tabloids is usually portrayed as a urban phenomenon it seems rather odd that most of the movie is set in the countryside - indeed, it’s only in the final 20 minutes when the action moves to a family home in a nearby town that things start to become unsettling.

A wider problem is that there’s little really to distinguish Eden Lake from recent efforts such as Paradise Lost and Timber Falls. It’s as if writer-director James Watkins had one brainwave – chav baddies replacing redneck baddies – and didn’t bother to inject any other new ideas, and everything else about the movie plays out exactly to a by-now tired formula.

The production values are reasonably high (the film shows off sweeping helicopter-shot footage as much as possible), but this slickness tends to curb the nasty atmosphere found in low budget exploitation classics, though the violence is genuinely shocking at times. It does at least benefit from convincing performances from Michael Fassbender and Kelly Reilly (who make a nice change from the pretty-but-bland young things usually found in these films) and, as one of the more reluctant youths, This Is England’s Thomas Turgoose is once again excellent (he’s so good, in fact, you almost can’t bear to see him die). But behind the central gimmick this is a silly, formulaic horror movie. Matt McAllister

VERDICT: 4/10
Nothing can disguise the fact that nasty chavs just aren’t as scary as crazed redneck cannibals.