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So, I'll review the British independent film, In Fear first, and then quickly follow that up with The Descent later this weekend before I contest War and Peace with The Shining! This is a short, simplistic film, and therefore it'll be quite little!
The plot follows a young couple, who after dating for a couple of weeks, decide to attend a nearby music festival in the reasonably desolate Irish countryside. However, their expedition is intercepted by a malevolent force that begins to stalk the duo.
Positives
There is a significant emphasis placed upon establishing a heavy sense of claustrophobia and tension, and Jeremy Lovering, the writer and director, manages to do so with quite a lot of success. In part, this is due to manipulation of camera angles that makes the already constricted car (that acts as the main setting for the vast majority of the film) seem incredibly more compact. However, the film's greatest accomplishment is creating an ambiance of uneasiness that's visibly haunting and fairly distressing. The lighting is gloomy throughout, which is fairly expected given its genre, but the camera lingers on seemingly ordinary scenes, as though we're meant to identify something and you can't help but feel a bit paranoid after a short while, just like the characters it depicts. Again, relating back to the camera angles, a vast amount of upward shots are used within the beginning, not only emphasising the overall derelict state of the environment they're in, but enhancing the feeling of hopelessness and entrapment, and as such, Lovering's combination of these techniques allows us to empathise perfectly with the characters we're watching, allowing their actions to come across as all the more authentic and rational, which is never a bad thing, because suspending our disbelief tends not to be the outcome of a well executed and crafted film.
The performances by the small cast, consisting of just 3 performers, are pretty good. I wouldn't particularly stretch this further, because the script let them down a bit towards the end. However, Allen Leech (of Downton Abbey fame) is suitably wicked, calculating, and sadistic in his role as the relentless menace playing with the protagonists. Nevertheless, the performances given by the couple (Iain De Caestecker and Alice Englert) are pretty authentic and believable, especially in portraying the slightly awkward but silent tension between a couple on the brink who barely even know one another, and in fact I'd say this is one of the film's more interesting explorations. They alienate one another, say and do stupid things, and their trust in one another begins to diminish (there are implications that either one of them is the one responsible for all the strange events occurring). It just adds an interesting layer on top of an already compelling film.
The score is simplistic too, relying mainly on infrequent noises, and although it's a subtle feature, that's easy to miss, it does succeed in intensifying the tension that it already presents.
Negatives
After the couple encounter Leech's character, the quality of pretty much every aspect of the film begins to decline. The ambiguity of whatever is responsible for tormenting the pair is completely removed with a pretty generic plot device. The following realisations and confrontations are drawn out and are fairly dull, and what was a film that's runtime seemed to fly over becomes dreadfully slow, and a bit repetitive. And what looked like a original film, with a seemingly inventive ending is diminished into a pretty forgettable film with unfulfilled promise.
Therefore, a lot of the core constituents of the film are reasonably mixed. The writing begins as an inventive piece that makes real life genuinely quite harrowing in an effective way, made even more interesting by the peculiar yet fairly fascinating interactions between the characters. Yet it ends up as being a bit of a mess, with a cast of unappealing, confusing characters. The direction, that previously focused on extreme close ups to magnify the progressively cataclysmic events, is substituted for extensive fight and chase scenes that have been done countless times before. It really is a film of two halves
Conclusion
It feels like it should be a short film, and it would have been substantially better if it had been. The first two acts of the film are enticing, and tremendously crafted, a feature that is not at all reflected in the closing act, and because the film began so promisingly, this is only made all the more noticeable.
The plot follows a young couple, who after dating for a couple of weeks, decide to attend a nearby music festival in the reasonably desolate Irish countryside. However, their expedition is intercepted by a malevolent force that begins to stalk the duo.
Positives
There is a significant emphasis placed upon establishing a heavy sense of claustrophobia and tension, and Jeremy Lovering, the writer and director, manages to do so with quite a lot of success. In part, this is due to manipulation of camera angles that makes the already constricted car (that acts as the main setting for the vast majority of the film) seem incredibly more compact. However, the film's greatest accomplishment is creating an ambiance of uneasiness that's visibly haunting and fairly distressing. The lighting is gloomy throughout, which is fairly expected given its genre, but the camera lingers on seemingly ordinary scenes, as though we're meant to identify something and you can't help but feel a bit paranoid after a short while, just like the characters it depicts. Again, relating back to the camera angles, a vast amount of upward shots are used within the beginning, not only emphasising the overall derelict state of the environment they're in, but enhancing the feeling of hopelessness and entrapment, and as such, Lovering's combination of these techniques allows us to empathise perfectly with the characters we're watching, allowing their actions to come across as all the more authentic and rational, which is never a bad thing, because suspending our disbelief tends not to be the outcome of a well executed and crafted film.
The performances by the small cast, consisting of just 3 performers, are pretty good. I wouldn't particularly stretch this further, because the script let them down a bit towards the end. However, Allen Leech (of Downton Abbey fame) is suitably wicked, calculating, and sadistic in his role as the relentless menace playing with the protagonists. Nevertheless, the performances given by the couple (Iain De Caestecker and Alice Englert) are pretty authentic and believable, especially in portraying the slightly awkward but silent tension between a couple on the brink who barely even know one another, and in fact I'd say this is one of the film's more interesting explorations. They alienate one another, say and do stupid things, and their trust in one another begins to diminish (there are implications that either one of them is the one responsible for all the strange events occurring). It just adds an interesting layer on top of an already compelling film.
The score is simplistic too, relying mainly on infrequent noises, and although it's a subtle feature, that's easy to miss, it does succeed in intensifying the tension that it already presents.
Negatives
After the couple encounter Leech's character, the quality of pretty much every aspect of the film begins to decline. The ambiguity of whatever is responsible for tormenting the pair is completely removed with a pretty generic plot device. The following realisations and confrontations are drawn out and are fairly dull, and what was a film that's runtime seemed to fly over becomes dreadfully slow, and a bit repetitive. And what looked like a original film, with a seemingly inventive ending is diminished into a pretty forgettable film with unfulfilled promise.
Therefore, a lot of the core constituents of the film are reasonably mixed. The writing begins as an inventive piece that makes real life genuinely quite harrowing in an effective way, made even more interesting by the peculiar yet fairly fascinating interactions between the characters. Yet it ends up as being a bit of a mess, with a cast of unappealing, confusing characters. The direction, that previously focused on extreme close ups to magnify the progressively cataclysmic events, is substituted for extensive fight and chase scenes that have been done countless times before. It really is a film of two halves
Conclusion
It feels like it should be a short film, and it would have been substantially better if it had been. The first two acts of the film are enticing, and tremendously crafted, a feature that is not at all reflected in the closing act, and because the film began so promisingly, this is only made all the more noticeable.