In Fear (2013)

Rating: R

Run Time: 85 mins

Director: Jeremy Lovering

Starring: Iain De Caestecker, Alice Englert, Allen Leech

Who was that fucking guy?

 Perhaps a great deal hinges on the answer to that question.  Then again, maybe not.

If this passes for “perhaps the best horror film of 2013,” we’re, quite simply, fucked.  If the face of modern, or post-modern, horror looks like this, we’re in for a dry spell, folks.  Well-acted and well-photographed.  Interesting idea for filming the story, which is, as a narrative, tired and a bit overused.  Ireland’s answer to hillbilly horror; although I guess you would call it hooligan horror, instead.  The Strangers on wheels (and, let me tell you, the two protagonists here are every bit as stupid).    

A couple who’ve been dating for two weeks are going to a music festival to join their mutual friends.  The male lead engineer stays over at a quaint hotel and convinces the female lead to acquiesce to staying over so they can do the horizontal bop (it is not made clear whether she ever intends to consummate what he calls their “two-month anniversary”- she is by a wide margin the more intelligent of the two,  so I would like to think she has a bit more self-esteem as well; he’s not a bad guy, not a drip or anything, just sort of clueless when a little quick-thinking resolve might have better served their later plight). 

First, they stop over at a small village pub; it’s the one you’ve seen in every Hammer monster movie since time immemorial, the same damn one in An American Werewolf in London, the same in every movie made in the United Kingdom (for the Australian variation, please see Razorback).  The one where the locals may share a full set of teeth among the whole lot, one or two of them may have a daughter-wife or perhaps an extra testicle, they’re all drinking Guinness (although there are other perfectly good English or Irish stouts), and there’s one fella who is rreeaally retarded and he’s playing a tin whistle like Charlie Daniels plays the fiddle.  The one where they always shut the absolute fuck up as soon as you cross the threshold and then stare at you with their little beady, in-bred eyes like you have a penis for a nose.  That pub…

I’ve been in a few of those English pubs and the atmosphere isn’t that intolerable.  I think perhaps the English do make a rather cold impression at first, but once they get used to the idea of you hanging around and they warm up to you, they can be friendly enough.  They may still leave your dick swaying in the wind when the village werewolf comes a huntin’, but we can’t have it all.

As have most of us, I’ve been in a few small towns in the good ole U.S.A., too, and unless the town is a tourist destination where the locals have to be nice to you, they can be pretty unfriendly as well.  That is even the case in the South, Texas say, where the reputation for hospitality, mythical as it may be, is not quite what it’s cracked up to be.  Here’s the point, I think: people who live in small towns in out of the way places in the country do so for a reason.  Some of those reasons are merely misanthropic, some are far more insidious, homicidal even.  At heart, they don’t like other people, period, game over, man, and the less they have to see of them (even if they are neighbors who are equally and mutually distrustful), the better.  If you don’t want to squeal like a pig, don’t try to canoe down the Cahulawassee River.  If you don’t want to end up sausage on someone’s plate, don’t stop in Round Rock, man.

What is interesting about this pub, however, is that we don’t see any of that stranger-local interaction or the interior of the pub at all.   We may or may not witness the aftermath of what happened in there, but we only hear versions of what really transpired, and we’re never enlightened regarding the truth.  We can only speculate.  The filmmakers’ choice not to show us what happened is a good idea.  Not only do we never learn what the truth is or whether any blame should be ascribed to anyone, we don’t know or discover whether the bad things that befall our couple are in any way related at all to the first event or if the two are randomly and capriciously chosen for torment. 

There is little more to tell.  The two leave and are directed to where the hotel is supposed to be.  Suffice it to say, they never find it.  Along the way, there are some eerie occurrences and a good scary composition or two of the Halloween/ The Strangers sort.  There is a blatant Texas Chainsaw Massacre rip-off scene which implication amounts to the same as in the Tobe Hooper classic.     

And there is torment, most assuredly, although not at all of the terribly graphic kind.  Several red herrings are never resolved.  My impression is that these would not have been so insurmountable as to trip the sirens of the “implausibility bullshit register” if the film weren’t so slow in places that you had time, too much time, to think about “Hey, what about…?” or “Wait, I thought…?”

And whoever that guy is, he’s been very busy… 

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 4/10