This is a Scottish thriller. Never heard of any of the actors before, or the director. It's pretty good though and worth checking out. It's available on demand and on dvd. The offical website is here.
The story: a group of friends go to a remote cabin in the Scottish highlands. This is after fox hunting has been banned in Britian, but fox hunting continued as the police chose make the law a low priority. One person in the group is very vocal, public pro-fox hunting. After shooting and gutting a deer, the next morning they wake up stripped to their underwear and left on the moors in the cold where they are hunted by pro-animal extremists who force them to read an anti-hunting statement. However, all does not go as planned...
Was it good?
Yes.
I had never heard of this or any of the people in it so I had no idea what to expect. The movie does a lot of things very well that make it a film worth watching, but makes a few bad choices that prevent it from becoming a real classic.
*** SPOILERS -- there's no way to talk about the film without having some spoilers, but they are more general spoilers and fairly mild ****
First the good. The story takes it's time. It let's us get to know the characters and the situation. It starts talking about the banning of fox hunting and how polarizing that was. Then it focuses on the people. Two couples are in relationships. In one a man is preparing to propose to a woman. The other is a relationship just getting started, with a man bringing his American girlfriend out to Scotland for the first time. There is also an element with two brothers where one brother left for a long time, basically abandoning the other brother. All of this is well done. The writer finds interesting spaces for these relationships with lots of questions and lots of tension. Throughout the movie, there are clips to interviews with the characters where they can fill in some backstory about the people and places. It let's them give a lot of information quickly, so you feel like you get to know all the people fast and keeps the story moving. There is also a scene where the American woman shoots a deer and they later gut it. It is very disturbing and a nice prelude to what will happen when these people themselves are hunted.
The parts where the people are hunted have lots of tension and moves along. First they wake up with no idea what has happened, then the shooting begins. For the most part, they stick to a POV style, so we are in the situation with the characters which is effective. However, it is also here that the problems begin to appear.
The first problem is that the short interview segments continue. Now in the beginning, they were a nice way to quickly add information. Here, they keep pulling us out of the action and continually remind us that these people don't die. For a movie centered around people being hunted and shot at, to know none of them die takes a lot of the tension out of this section of the film.
The second problem is with what I call "the plan." Now most thrillers have two different plans -- there is the plan the bad guys have and the plan the good guys have to foil them. It's part of the fun of watching these sorts of movies. However, here, because the people-hunting-people are completely unknown we never get much sense of what their plan is. On the flip side, the people-being-hunted don't really ever get a plan either. Now this might work if the movie really stay in the POV of the characters (or better yet, one character) so it was a true man-in-the-trenches sort of feel, but they don't do that and with the constant cutting to the external interviews, it really cuts out a lot of the tension and makes you feel in places like you are just watching people run almost randomly, which isn't very exciting.
The third problem is the twist. Or rather lack of one. Anyone who reads a logline for the movie (hunters stripped almost-naked and then hunted) can guess most of the movie and it plays out according to form. What it needed was one good twist around 1/2-way or 3/4's in to shake things up. It wouldn't have to be a plot twist -- it could be something more emotional or perosonal. There is a shift when the people-being-hunted find a gun, but even that is pretty expected in this sort of movie. It's why movies like this need to have another element, usually something personal. THE DESCENT has the reveal that the woman's husband was having an affair, which puts a startling twist on the emotions of the film, since the movie revolved around the closeness of these women and how they had been affected since her husband's death. They do have a powerful emotional moment in the last quarter of the film, which would have made a powerful ending, but then the movie drags on another five minutes with boring post-interviews, making you feel more like you get to the end, rather than having that last rush of excitement that great movies have.
Even with those flaws, it's a well made movie and a good watch for people who like realistic thrillers.
*** RECOMMEND ****
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