A tense and well-made Australian thriller that gets a little too ugly for its own good.
People on vacation have always been the easiest targets for depraved killers. While many slasher movies tend to go for more sensationalistic violence—The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes being two of the most extreme--sometimes just meeting strangers in the middle of nowhere is enough to freak anybody out.
Coming out just a few months after the similarly grim Hounds of Love, this first-time feature from Australian director Damien Power tries to take a classier look at terrorized tourists, but runs into problems in trying to keep the viewer entertained.
Power’s film begins with couple Ian and Samantha (Ian Meadows, Harriet Dyer), on a trip to Gungilee Falls, a beautiful vacation spot in the Australian woods. Once there, they discover that other campers have set up their tent, yet they’re nowhere to be found. They start to become suspicious after it gets dark without having seen traces of other people, but then they find a baby left alone and start suspecting foul play.
The film then switches perspective to local hunters German (Aaron Pedersen) and Chook (Aaron Glenane), who seem to need something to keep themselves entertained. They come upon another couple with a toddler and 16-year-old Em (Tiarnie Coupland), just as they’re arriving at the falls, but it’s obvious the two strangers are up to no good.
While Killing Ground falls into the same sub-genre of horror as Wolf Creek or other films mentioned above, it’s not quite as extreme in terms of its gore, yet still is quite disturbing. It’s a fairly simple story with just a few characters based in a single location, but Power switches things up by telling the story using a scattered non-linear story device. This may throw some for a loop, at first, but it doesn’t take long to catch on where things are leading.
One thing Power mostly gets right is that he spends enough time with both the predators and their victims, separately, so that you start to care for the latter even if you don’t fully understand the motivations of the former.
As soon as you meet the two locals and they start ogling the teenage sister of the couple with a baby, you can already figure out where their intentions are, and it sucks to be proven right. When she goes off on her own and encounters the two men, things quickly start to take an ugly downturn. You don’t have to actually see them rape either of the women to know it happened and for it to tie your stomach into a knot.
It’s one of many things that makes you wonder who is supposed to be entertained by a movie where you’re basically watching innocent people come to harm?
When Ian learns the truth about the samaritans who have come seemingly to help where the film’s pace picks up, as does the tension, but there’s still more ugliness to come. It eventually goes one step too far, as Power makes a storytelling decision that’s tough to forgive. It’s bad enough his movie is basically telling women that if you go on vacation in Australia, you’re likely to encounter unrepentant rapists, literally the lowest scum of the earth, but even they are likely to have their limits when watching the film’s climax.
As with many of these films, watching innocent people getting terrorized and killed for no particular reason eventually wears itself thin, and Power drags out the inevitable, quite literally delving into darker territory. For whatever reason, the last ten minutes of the movie are set almost completely in pitch black, making it too dark to tell what is happening, and that’s a frustrating way to end your thriller.
Power is certainly a skilled filmmaker, who uses the quiet of nature as effectively as he does his composer’s simple score, and his cast does a good job selling their characters, too. Still, it’s a tough movie to watch and an even tougher one to enjoy, because it’s hard to be entertained watching relatively nice people having their vacations ruined in such a horrific way.
Killing Ground played at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival this past weekend and will open in select cities and on VOD on July 21.
The Verdict
Killing Ground is a well-made movie that, at times, is just too plain ugly. It may be mild compared to other “torture porn,” but it still won’t sit very well with everyone who watches it. It also doesn’t do nearly enough to set itself apart from other films in this vein, other than its non-linear storytelling, which isn’t particularly clever.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire