Eden Lake: Critic Reviews

This looks to me like the best British horror film in years: nasty, scary and tight as a drum.

An effectively harrowing Brit thriller-cum-horror pic whose yuppie protags' weekend getaway runs violently afoul of the local youth.

Well acted, well directed, and totally intense, 'Eden Lake' is the best horror film to come out of the UK in years.

It's not your typical "wooded horror" movie, but Eden Lake works exceedingly well, and will probably stick in your gut for a little while.

A gruelling, grimly effective British chiller.

A well acted, smartly directed horror flick that's gory, disturbing, terrifying and topical.

...while Eden Lake is effective, something feels not quite right about cheering for prepubescent kids to get their fatal comeuppance.

It is impossible not to admire the way Watkins ratchets up the tension in his debut as director (he wrote My Little Eye) and keeps his tale strictly to 90 minutes.

Daily Mail scaremongering? Possibly. But formidably well-made, all the same.

So harsh, bleak and intense it achieves a level of raw power. A sordid little nightmare of contemporary England.

Dispiriting and unpleasant, a trip to Eden Lake will leave most viewers feeling the need for a hot shower and a tetanus jab.

For all the brutality of the confrontation with knife-weilding, car-nicking local scum - think Stanley knives gouging out tongues - it's never far off ludicrous.

It doesn't fight shy of a truly frightening final twist, which makes it not only bleaker but also more truthful than virtually every other movie in this genre, which all too often is over-populated and under-humanised.

It is not often that The Sneak feels like walking out of a movie. But this exploitative, patronising and nauseatingly violent take on Britain's yob culture had your critic eyeing up the exit.

Eden Lake: pursuit, persecution, violent death.

The film's one major fault is that Reilly's character repeatedly acts in ways that serve the plot, but which run contrary to rational human behaviour. By contrast, the shattering downbeat ending is well earned and genuinely shocking.

It's a claustrophobic marvel, and an impressive debut by Watkins.

It's not long before the claret starts to flow. And it won't be too long before you start eyeing the exit sign.

Frustratingly, there is potential in Watkins' claustrophobic, back-to-nature setting, but, in trying to play 'edgy' with contemporary anxieties, his cooked-to-formula script merely sinks to the level of the gutter press exploiting those fears.

Instead of Deliverance's deep backwoods hicks we have now backwoods chavs who live a life unscrutinised by cops or anyone. Watkins has consumed all those tabloid hoodie tales and regurgitated a horror.

You don't watch it, you survive it. A battering experience, and the hardest Brit horror in years.

if it gets people talking about youth violence, class conflict and the gulf of social inequality in Britain, then all the better - and if it does not, at least it will give them a frightening, albeit derivative, ride.

Has some seriously haunting themes torn right from the headlines, giving us something thoughtful to chew on. Besides our fingernails.