In Fear

I don't mind weird when it's done well. Take something from David Lynch or the new UK king of weird Ben Wheatley and it can be mesmerising despite unexplained parts of the plot or mysterious characters. In Fear writer and director Peter Lovering looks to have taken this approach but has got it badly wrong. Many people have already mentioned the holes in the plot, its like a blooming Swiss cheese. Just imagine you have been attacked by a crazee wearing a mask only to escape to the car and race off down the road and then hit someone. would you a( Stop and go back to check if the person is alright or b)get the hell out of there? You guessed it, our intrepid hero and heroin go back. Ridiculous. A man and a woman in a car get the lost in the Irish countryside and strange things happen apparently because of a spilt drink in a pub. The end defies description never mind explanation. Watchable though.

In Fear is a tale of a young couple on their way to a festival, whom detour, at the request of the male half, to a remote idyllic hotel.

Things go horribly wrong.

Tension and paranoia builds nicely in the opening third of the movie. Our couple get lost in a network of country lanes, supposedly leading to the hotel, which turn out to be a maze. As dusk approaches, confusion and anxiety turn to fear and dread ...

This is about as much as I can divulge without spoiling anything, however, the plot from this point onwards goes from irritating to ridiculous. Painful-to-view clichés and "they'd never do that" type gaffs litter the movie until the end which, when it comes, leaves you wondering if the writer got stuck for an ending.

When it's tense, it works well but too much in this film went awry for me. I saw it at the FrightFest film festival and did speak to a lot of fans who loved it, but not I.

I could be wrong, so it's perhaps worth checking out, if you like a claustrophobic, low-budget vibe in your horror but if not, I'd tread with caution.

Bored and looking for something to watch, I was browsing through lists of the best horror movies of 2013. The more and more "In Fear" appeared in them, the more my interest was piqued.

Well let's just say the anticipation of watching it was much more exciting than the actual process of watching it. All we have with "In Fear" is a poorly scripted, annoyingly repetitive horror movie that is carried along by a phenomenal score that is way better than it has any right to be. The sounds mesh with the images so well that there were moments that I still felt nervous, even though I knew what was going to happen, courtesy of the by-the-numbers script.

Tom and Lucy are two people that just met two weeks prior. On their way to a music festival in a nearby town, Tom decides to surprise Lucy by taking her to a hotel for a night...a rather questionable move for people that have just met. Thankfully, Lucy seems to be fine with it.

But there are some red flags from the outset: For one, the only way to get to the hotel is to follow a truck, whose owner they never see. Even more alarming? He points to a locked gate, insinuating that is where they should go next, before suddenly leaving them alone. I don't know about you, but that would be enough for me to get the hell out of there and never return, but Tom and Lucy, stupid horror characters that they are, do as they're instructed.

From here, we get thirty minutes of them driving around in circles, inexplicably continuing to follow the same signs to the motel even after learning it only takes them back to where they started. Somehow, these scenes manage to be creepy, at least at first, if for no other reason than the aforementioned score. Of course, once minute twenty rolls around of the same old thing, it starts to lose its luster. Then once Max arrives, things go from bad to worse, both for the characters, and for the viewer, leading to an abomination of an ending.

"In Fear" is certainly a competent example of independent filmmaking, at least from a visual standpoint, and I guess it deserves some points for that. It's well shot, well acted, well lit, and despite a few confusing cuts, pretty well edited. Unfortunately, the one thing it's missing, besides a shred of believability, is a halfway decent script. These characters are ones you've seen in dozens, if not hundreds, of horror movies before, in that they are clearly only reacting to the needs of the script; they do not act like normal people attempting to get out of a desperate situation, but rather. Put any real person in this situation, and it would be a five minute movie with no scares and no real action.

Come to think of it, I've essentially summed up "In Fear", only it somehow needs 85 minutes to do that.

... just the way I like it ! So yes, of course I will be pretty subjective in this review (but aren't everyone else in theirs, after all ?)

In current horror movie era flooded with zombies, haunted houses and paranormal activities, little movies like this one come as real refreshment. To be honest it's more mystery/thriller/suspense than horror, but nevertheless.

Simple plot (Man and woman in a car, lost in a maze of narrow roads at the countryside trying to find a secluded hotel they reserved on internet), combined with nice visuals and directing/editing is just what I wanted to see from a movie. No two and a half hours of over the top action scenes, no special effects, CGI monsters, ghosts and flying sheets ... just a little mystery and healthy dose of suspense.

Yes, the main protagonists maybe don't do and act how one would expect "normal" people to do in such situation, but it's impossible to predict anyway how "normal" people would behave in every situation. This is good enough.

I must say that I find recent British movies (to name a few I can remember without looking at my voting history: Truth or die, The Seasoning House, The Cottage ...) more appealing to me than ones from Hollywood. I think if you hated "Cabin in the woods" or you're just tired of movies like that, there's a big chance you'll like "In Fear"

Bringing together elements of, and to varying degrees echoing film such as 'The Blair Witch Project', 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' and the fairly recent British nasties 'Kill List' and 'Eden Lake', director Jeremy Lovering brings us a tale of two people in an early days relationship getting lost in the woods. Relatively speaking, they are stranger to one another as well as to us, and one feels that in another writer/director's hands, this fact could have become more pertinent than it actually does here, which is a shame.

They are on their way to a music festival and are trying to find a hotel they are booked in at. Seems straightforward enough, right? Of course things don't go as planned; they find themselves driving in circles with no hotel to be seen. Next thing confusion and concern set in; as dusk draws close, the weather worsens, their fuel runs low, their map proves inaccurate, and the country roads they drive all begin to look the same, we are invited to feel the very real fear most of us can relate to, and it must be said in this at least, the film proves extremely effective. Indeed, the first hour or so of 'In Fear' had me gripped and actually feeling something I don't often have the pleasure of when watching a horror/thriller on my own: Genuinely spooked. The performances are reasonable and the tension nicely handled; Lovering's ability to generate palpable horror from a simple scenario and drag it out for quite so long IS impressive.

It is a shame, then, that when the time comes for the film to play its hand a little more, the tension is released and we enter a world of silliness; the reasoning for the situation arising in the first place and its justification seem flimsy. Shattered is the hope that we were going to be dealing with loftier themes of existential fear and relationships, or even something more down to earth and rooted in an important social element, ala 'Eden Lake'; the last twenty minutes takes a direction a lot more simple and I daresay boring, given the promise of the previous acts.

This guy will make a better film than this in future, but for now, this is a reasonable shot at something compelling, even if it falters in the last act. Worth a watch for the promise it makes with its fist hour.