I'd say this film is more of a puzzling suspense film than a horror flick. It's a rather intelligently-written film, but it still didn't completely wow me. Again, the typical handful of young adults, this time in the setting of taking a boat through some reedy marsh-like area of the UK. For a long time, the entire movie feels like a jigsaw puzzle. We're shown glimpses of the whole, but we still can only guess what they all fit together to finally mean.
Is it a basic madman slasher thing? Are they being haunted by ghosts? Dopplegangers? Ah, it's some weird temporal flux thing...but still, that only explains a piece of the overall mystery. Who's the guy in the hood with the gun? What's his beef exactly? This movie will do a good job for a lot of people to unsettle them because the audience keeps having to ask these questions. And as we're calmly asking questions, our main protagonists are panicking here and there at what they don't understand. So much of the suffering and death comes from this really wonderful plot device: when you experience something you don't understand, the worse part of you wants to panic. When you panic, you're prone to make bad decisions. When you make bad decisions, bad things happen and people get hurt. The fact that so many of our main characters just screwed themselves over because of this speaks to me of relatively smarter storywriting.
However, this film isn't without its flaws. I said a lot of people would be unsettled by the nature of this film's storyline, but not me. Again, it felt more like a mystery movie than a horror flick, and the climax, while it still puts together enough of the pieces to satisfy us, didn't leave me feeling like much was really resolved. There's no real denouement, especially as we are led to believe with the final scene that the couple who "escaped" get caught back at the beginning of the entire temporal loop that messed them all up in the first place. Give a try, though; you might enjoy it.
Is it a basic madman slasher thing? Are they being haunted by ghosts? Dopplegangers? Ah, it's some weird temporal flux thing...but still, that only explains a piece of the overall mystery. Who's the guy in the hood with the gun? What's his beef exactly? This movie will do a good job for a lot of people to unsettle them because the audience keeps having to ask these questions. And as we're calmly asking questions, our main protagonists are panicking here and there at what they don't understand. So much of the suffering and death comes from this really wonderful plot device: when you experience something you don't understand, the worse part of you wants to panic. When you panic, you're prone to make bad decisions. When you make bad decisions, bad things happen and people get hurt. The fact that so many of our main characters just screwed themselves over because of this speaks to me of relatively smarter storywriting.
However, this film isn't without its flaws. I said a lot of people would be unsettled by the nature of this film's storyline, but not me. Again, it felt more like a mystery movie than a horror flick, and the climax, while it still puts together enough of the pieces to satisfy us, didn't leave me feeling like much was really resolved. There's no real denouement, especially as we are led to believe with the final scene that the couple who "escaped" get caught back at the beginning of the entire temporal loop that messed them all up in the first place. Give a try, though; you might enjoy it.