Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
A bunch of the stuff that I had reserved to watch on Tubi left the service all at once, which put me in a bit of a bind—I had to watch a bunch of stuff as quickly as I could before it disappeared. That meant watching movies I knew I’d get to eventually much sooner than I planned. One of those movies was Eden Lake, a film with shades of torture porn and living as a close cousin to the home invasion genre, two areas of horror I’m not a huge fan of.
What’s more significant, though, is that from the opening moments I had the feeling that I’d seen this before. In fact, I felt it so strongly that I had to check through my records (yes, I keep records of the lists I’m pursuing) to see if I hadn’t already watched this and just forgotten to cross it off. It turns out I was both right and wrong--Eden Lake is very much a remake of the French Extremity film Ils.
In Ils, a young couple is attacked in their home by a group of teens, who eventually chase them into the woods. Eden Lake shortens that set up by putting our two protagonists out in the woods to begin with. Steve (Michael Fassbender!) and Kelly (Jenny Greengrass) head off for a weekend at an old quarry that has been turned into a lake (and will soon be a new housing development called Eden Lake, hence the name of the film). Steve’s plan is to propose to Jenny while they are camping out for the weekend. When they arrive, they are harassed by a group of teens, and while things get tense, they don’t get violent.
It's soon evident that Steve and Kelly are targets, though. They wake up the next morning to find a flat tire and their food infested with insects. They walk into town, continue to be harassed, and encounter a few towns people who seem terrified of their own children. From here, it just gets more and more unpleasant and torturous. There’s no real need to go into a lot of detail on this. There’s stabbings, barbed wire, burnings, and a lot more nastiness, all of it orchestrated by the obviously psychopathic Brett (Jack O’Connell), the leader of the teens.
The entire point of Eden Lake and films like it are not to specifically scare the audience. This is about making the audience feel unsafe and helpless, and it does this very well. That’s exactly the reason for The Purge, Hostel, Turistas, Ils, The Strangers, Vacancy and pretty much any other movie in this genre. Lots of films put our protagonists in a position of being overwhelmed by something terrible, but these films in particular put us in the position of watching our protagonists necessarily be ground down and destroyed.
This leaves me in two places with Eden Lake. On the one hand, it’s hard not to say that this is a well-made film, because it is. It does exactly what it wants to do and it does it extremely well. On the other hand, this is a film that is impossible to recommend to anyone. There’s nothing about this that is hopeful or good—it’s a 90-minute exercise in cinematic nihilism, and it leaves an oily film on the audience once it’s completed. It’s like watching someone being beaten simply for existing.
It begs the question of the real purpose of this kind of nihilistic film. There has to be some kind of point to this, doesn’t there? But doesn’t that invalidate the entire idea of nihilism if there is? Why make something that, beyond its cinematic skill in the filming and the performances, has no actual merit in any real sense?
This is shorter than my normal, but there’s nothing more to say about it.
Why to watch Eden Lake: Straightforward real-world horror.
Why not to watch: It’s nihilistic and nothing more.