In Fear – Film Review

Young English couple Tom (Iain De Caestecker) and Lucy (Alice Englert) leave a pub after an argument with the locals and set off in their car on their way to a weekend music festival in Ireland. Prompted by Tom, they decide to make a detour along strangely deserted country roads to a remote hotel where Tom’s booked an overnight stay. The road signs prove more than a little bit dodgy, leading them in circles. It gets dusk, then dark, and the couple are lost and in fear.

In horror films, of course, the first rule is keep to the path. If you don’t, things will go terribly wrong and very bad things will start to happen. Don’t take shortcuts, don’t go on the moors!

TV veteran Jeremy Lovering’s enterprising first feature has a brisk, capable, efficient low-budget TV feel about it. It starts up brightly, then builds up plenty of tension eerie atmosphere. But in mid section, like its heroes, it loses the plot and gets lost in repeating itself over and over. However, it has an excellent Hitcher-style climax when the couple stop on the road and meet mysterious mad Max (Allen Leech). Though the ending isn’t really entirely satisfying either.

The three actors are excellent, doing exactly what’s needed. I can’t imagine anyone being better. The couple do silly, annoying things, sometimes giving the actors problems to remain sympathetic but they do. Of course that’s normal in this kind of chiller. You don’t expect it to be realistic or convincing, just spooky. And it kind of is most of the time.

The direction’s plenty moody and atmospheric, piling on the quirky and creepy quota, with effective claustrophobic filming on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall. David Katznelson’s noirish cinematography and Daniel Pemberton and Roly Porter’s unsettling score are useful, well-crafted assets to the film, adding extra character and dimension.

The problem is Lovering’s screenplay. There just isn’t anything like enough of it to fill the 85 minutes of running time. With sufficient story for, say, a 50-minute TV episode, it feels emaciated and padded. The script is fine as far as it goes but it lacks enough ideas and full impact, and probably it needs the boost of an extra subplot and more characters. One more re-write would have been good. There’s an excellent movie in here somewhere, frustratingly waiting to break out.

However, In Fear does work on the level of an intermittently scary nightmare and it is maybe worth a little look as a pretty decent thriller.

(C) Derek Winnert 2013 derekwinnert.com