Eden Lake (2008)

Holy shit, what a movie!! Our British cinema industry isn't really in too much of a habit of making horror movies nowadays, although Hammer was recently revived for periodic releases. Eden Lake is a tragedy, a living portrait, a social statement - it is everything you don't really find in modern horrors. Back in the '70s and '80s, as I have discussed in other reviews, horror was used as a channel for points to be made. Black Christmas examined the defensive patriarchal opposition of the women's liberation movement, Last House on the Left reflected on class tensions and Vietnam angst, and it is exactly the movie that I saw serving as inspiration throughout Eden Lake. It is a powerful, gripping, appalling horror of the strongest kind: the ones that lie squarely within the bounds of reality and possibility.

Jenny (Kelly Reilly) and Steve (Michael Fassbender) are your typical young middle class couple with their whole lives ahead of them. Jenny, a sweet thing with a very Mia Farrow quality about her, is a nursery school teacher, and approaches everything sensitively and smilingly scorns her partner for swearing. Steve is the lovable, rugged Irishman, who likes to kid about, but thinks and acts with reason. Steve is planning to propose to Jenny, and so takes her for a weekend away at a remote quarry that he visited with his dad as a kid, which is due to be developed into a luxury gated community. The first night of their trip, the couple stay at a pub B&B, where flabby slobs wearing tracksuits and gold chains clutch pints of 'Wifebeater' and spit at the pavement. The beer garden is overrun with gobby Northerners who smack their kids about and constantly yell. The opposition is established.

When the couple get down to the quarry, it is a vast and beautiful wildland with a lake running through the centre, but thankfully, they are driving some fancy Jeep which handles the terrain with relative ease. The sign for the new development called Eden Lake is graffitied with the eloquent slogan Fuck Off Yuppy Cunts! Down on the beach, a gang of chavs show up and start wreaking chavoc (see what I did there?!) Naturally, they have an aggressive dog in tow, that terrorises strangers, and an obnoxiously loud boombox. Steve casually approaches, and quite reasonably asks them to turn the music down and keep the dog in line. Here we have a defining moment, which fully establishes the theme of the picture as class conflict.

I have lived in various parts of England all my life, and have a fairly diverse experience of social classes and cliques. Our society has changed immensely in recent years as 'benefits culture' and what sociologists refer to as the Underclass have been on the dismal rise. This means that the timewasting dickheads from school who came from bad homes no longer have to earn a lifestyle for themselves, but have it handed out to them, and the formerly widely-held working class pride of providing for one's family seems to have gone out of the window. The actual working class, who work in lower paid and lower skilled roles, is shrinking in population, as the effortless underclass lifestyle begins to be inherited. A whole generation have seen their parents sitting on their arses, smoking and screaming and getting everything for nothing, and so the cycle begins. The majority of violent offences are committed by people of this very nature. In this country, turn on the TV at 9am and you will be treated to a smorgasbord of the nation's most dim-witted, thuggish, shameless and useless, being made into a spectacle, and at the most tasteless of times, celebrities.

Eden Lake addresses the battle of the classes. Jenny and Steve are middle class, respectable and well behaved. The gang of youths, which includes Jack O'Connell and Thomas Turgoose from This is England, are the underclass, who have no respect for others and no idea of civil boundaries. A wide shot of both parties sat on opposite sides of the beach illustrates the spectrum of not only class, but inherently morals, values and humanity. The gang further antagonise the couple, and steal their car. This leads to a fistfight in which Steve accidentally stabs the dog. You can practically see the infamous 'red mist' fall over the owner's eyes. From this point on, it's fair game, as far as the kids are concerned.

Let's discuss the kids, and that's what they are. The ringleader is the terrifying thug Brett (O'Connell), who is volatile, controlling and violent. Everything that goes on is his idea. He has a few other boys with him, some look no older than 12, and a witless girlfriend Paige, who is ordered to film the gang's atrocities on her phone. Brett literally forces these children to inflict violence on the couple, and when things don't go his way, the most effective, yet vile and haunting moment in the movie takes place. Another child, a very young boy named Adam, who looks about ten or eleven, is roped into the proceedings, and when Jenny narrowly escapes her death and runs for the hills, Brett hangs a petrol-soaked tyre around the child's neck and sets his head on fire. This image haunted me for years after I first saw this movie, and it was with it in mind that I approached a rewatching with caution. But it is exactly what it should be: it is the crucifix in The Exorcist, it is the eyeball in Hostel... for a serious movie (and I say this to exclude any ceaseless exploitation fests that are lesser works) to reach its full impact, it has to dare to make its statement without any sugar coating. If we are to fear for society, for our children, on the message we take from watching this movie, we have to be given something to really fear. And here, we fear not demons or even evil adults, but twisted children. Brett's rage is boundless, he is wicked to the very core, and this we can be sure of, because of this single act.

Poor Steve has bled to death and been burned after being captured and tortured by the kids. It looks like Jenny might make it, now that she's managed to kill one of the kids, stolen a van and sped off towards town. But if the middle class heroes, or at least one of them, survived the ordeal, then the movie wouldn't be making its point. She unwittingly crashes the van in the garden of (here comes the Last House twist) Brett's parents' house. The family assist her at first, until they get a frantic call from Brett telling them what's happened, and they realise the van belongs to a family member. As is typical of these sorts of people, a gang of about half a dozen furious men arrive to avenge their thug kids, and Jenny is dispatched. But not before we see Brett appear, and get beaten like a puppy by his old man, and disappear to his room where he glares at himself lengthily in the mirror, as if in acknowledgement of his disease, but gutless self-absolution. He sees his own treatment, as many a PC social worker would, as justification for his own actions. He is not human enough to recognise his responsibility in breaking the cycle he knows all too well the effects of.

There is a primary and secondary message in all this. The first is that Britain is finally broken; no matter how the civilised reason and negotiate, they will be beaten down by senseless violence. The second is that violence is a cycle; the aggressor was formerly the victim of a senior aggressor, and has been conditioned into a mindset of violence. Eden Lake is terrifying because it is so true. It was met with some criticism over stereotyping of working class people, but as I have already addressed, the numbers of people like the children in this movie are on the rise, warranting a classing of their own. There is still, as ever, a perfectly peaceful, respectable working class out there who live honest and good lives. But in a country where Jeremy Kyle can make three shows a day for ten years and still find new people to appear, I concede that people can't really be blamed for drawing such conclusions.