Horror movie hits new peak

Seriously bloody horrible in every particular, and uncompromisingly bleak to the very end, this looks to me like the best British horror film in years: nasty, scary and tight as a drum.

It is a violent ordeal nightmare that brutally withholds the longed-for redemptions and third-act revenges, offering only a nihilist scream and a vicious satirical twist in our perceived social wounds: knife-crime, gangs and the fear of a broken society.

Writer-director James Watkins once worked on the reasonable horror-thrillers Gone and My Little Eye, and this comes courtesy of the production team that brought us the recent, much admired, but in my view slightly overrated British horror The Descent.

Eden Lake puts all of them in the shade.

There are the inevitable folk memories of Deliverance here, but also hints of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and perhaps even Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills. And in its final act, as the face of anguished heroine Kelly Reilly becomes a wraith-mask of mud, blood and despair, she starts looking like something from a very English Apocalypse Now.

Reilly plays Jenny, an infant-school teacher whose hunky boyfriend Steve has asked her away for an outdoorsy camping holiday by a lovely woodland lake.

Steve is played by Michael Fassbender, a young and fiercely charismatic Irish actor who is suddenly and justifiably ubiquitous on our screens.

Steve, very sweetly, has a romantic aim in view: he wants to propose, and is trying to find just the right time to do it.

As they head out of town in Steve's flashy 4x4, laughing happily at Kylie Minogue's voice programmed into the satnav, everything seems lovely.

But wait. When they arrive, they find their idyll has been bought by a real-estate company, which proposes to turn the land into a hateful "gated community"; the company has surrounded it with a fence and even given it a vulgar new name: Eden Lake.

With a hint of the lairy aggression that is to prove so explosive, Steve insists they simply trespass, sneaking in through a gap in the fence. But their subsequent delicious sunbathing by this glorious stretch of water is soon disrupted by a scary gang of youths: a nasty bunch with a ferocious rottweiler.

They are led by teen bully Brett (Jack O'Connell) who is surrounded by cringing courtiers and lieutenants, including a hapless young boy called Cooper, played by Thomas Turgoose.

Tensely, Steve tries asking them nicely to turn their music down, and through a series of incremental provocations that are all too plausible, the confrontation escalates out of control.

Quite recently, I saw a gutwrenching short film called Soft by Simon Ellis, which evokes similar ideas to Eden Lake; then, as now, I was reminded of something that the late Alexander Walker, film critic, once wrote about Kubrick's Clockwork Orange: we hate and fear our children - because they are going to kill us. Eden Lake has the same idea. The confrontation here isn't about race and not even exclusively about class; it's not about townies and hillbillies, or blacks and whites, or yuppies and chavs.

At bottom, it's about older people and the young: a gang of feral children who are as powerful as adults.

They instinctively exploit the indulgences and prerogatives extended to them as children, having semi-comprehendingly imbibed a sense of resentment and entitlement from their own elders.

Cleverly managing both his narrative and the audience's expectations, Watkins periodically takes his hero and heroine out of danger and, in one of these illusory interludes of safety, they order breakfast at a local diner where the waitress, perhaps the mother of these killer-kids, jovially asks Steve if they have been "terrorising" him.

When Steve can't help but answer, coldly, in the affirmative, she says, tauntingly, surely not - a big, grown-up bloke like him? Steve has a destructive machismo of his own, a settled intention never to lose face and be bullied by a bunch of children.

There is a tremendous scene right at the beginning, in which Steve sees the gang's BMX bikes all parked outside someone's house, and he bull-headedly insists on marching in and confronting the parents.

It is a teeth-gnawingly tense moment, because by swaggering but then sneaking around in an apparently empty house, Steve has suddenly put himself in the wrong. He is now the criminal, the arrogant aggressor, and his great big flashy car - in horrible contradistinction to the kids' titchy bikes - now labels him once again as the overdog, and that conspicuous motor makes him and Jenny all too trackable. It is a clever and suspenseful moment.

From here, the violence gets worse and worse. It is as if Watkins has taken the famous news picture of the hoodie making the "gun" gesture behind David Cameron's back - and photoshopped a real weapon into his hand. But it is believable in a way that does not depend on a neurotic attention to sensational newspaper stories: it has its own internal logic.

And, when Jenny finally gets some kind of violent revenge, and this goes horrendously wrong, it is, once again, all too believable.

Watkins crushes the good guys' last stand with a realist moment of despair and blundering horror to match Michael Haneke's tape-rewind scene in his Funny Games.

Eden Lake is hardly for everyone: and I certainly can't claim to like it in any normal sense. There are, arguably, some plot-glitches relating to mobile phones, and why 999 is not at one moment dialled - though this can be explained by the principals' dazed inattention.

Eden Lake is exceptionally well made, ruthlessly extreme, relentlessly upsetting. I am thinking of sending my therapy bills to Mr Watkins personally.