jack o'connell

Eden Lake (2008)

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I seem to remember seeing the heading “Dimension Extreme” on quite a few DVDs during that imprint’s heyday. The Wikipedia page that lists all of Dimensions’s releases includes over thirty films, which is still fewer than I would have thought, but it also doesn’t include Eden Lake, so who’s to really say. Their quality runs the gamut, from distant follow-ups to franchises whose sequelitis ran them into the ground (Children of the Corn: Genesis, Hellraiser: Revelations, Diary of the Dead), direct-to-video cash-ins on moderately successful theatrical features originally released by parent company Dimension (Feast II and III, Pulse 2 and 3), and the occasional standout like Teeth, Black Sheep, and La Terza madre (to me, at least). In my mind, I had always associated them with the glut of torture-focused horror films that were released during Dimension Extreme’s active period (2007-2011, although the onslaught began with Saw in 2004), but based on a review of their titles, that wasn’t really their bread and butter. It could certainly be argued that 2008’s Eden Lake falls into that category, however, as it’s an unrelentingly brutal movie in which people are burned alive, bleed out, and get impaled by spikes while fleeing their killers, and it’s also decidedly reactionary in the way of much horror of that time. I found myself checking how much more of this there would be to endure at less than halfway through the film and had to do so several more times before the credits rolled. 

Jenny (Kelly Reilly) is a primary school teacher going on a weekend away to Eden Lake with her boyfriend, Steve (Michael Fassbender), where he plans to propose. He’s picked the location because he and some friends have taken diving trips there before, and it’s soon to be overrun with micromansions by a pending development. Upon arrival, they have to drive some distance around the construction site’s fencing, but park somewhere with a lovely view before making their way down to the beachfront and setting up for the day. After a brief encounter with a shy boy named Adam, they see him later being harassed by a gaggle of local teen hooligans. The leader, Brett (Jack O’Connell), allows his unruly dog to hassle Jenny, prompting Steve to confront them, to no avail. Eventually, the kids grow bored and leave, and Steve & Jenny spend the night on the beach, only to discover the following morning that their provisions are full of insects; their trip back to the local village for more is delayed by a bottle that’s propped up to puncture the jeep’s tire when put in reverse. After a quick breakfast in town that includes a minor altercation with a waitress who is defensive about the potential that her kids may have been involved, they settle back in at the beach for the afternoon, but just before Steve can propose, they realize that the beach bag containing the car keys is gone, and climb up to their parking spot to find the Jeep is missing as well. A later confrontation with the teens results in them pulling a knife on the adults and Brett’s dog is killed in a scuffle, setting him off on a rampage of revenge against Jenny & Steve that can only end one way. 

For some time, I was hesitant to check out Jack O’Connell’s work because he had just been too good as the utterly detestable James Cook in Skins, and it wasn’t until his one-two punch in Sinners & 28 Years Later last year that I realized that it had been long enough and it was time to let go of my hatred for Cook. He was still a loathsome monster in this year’s Bone Temple, but despite his propensity to play villains that are of a certain type, he can access a broader range within that category. Here, he’s a budding sociopath who blooms into murder and torture, and it plays like a preview of what his career would largely consist of. This could just as easily be what might have happened to Jimmy Crystal if the U.K. hadn’t fallen to the Rage virus, right down to his merry band of little soldiers. There’s the committed criminal who’s handy with the box-cutter, the baby-faced kid who wants out and eventually gets beaten to death by Brett, the one with no characteristics, the hesitant one who throws up when forced to take part in torturing the captured Steve, and the girl who’s there to pull her phone out and film when Brett tells her to, to use as insurance against any of the other kids from going to the authorities once things have gotten to a point of no return. It’s brutal, but it’s also cliché, and it’s so unrelenting that one finds one’s self wondering how much more of this we’re going to be subjected to. 

I found myself thinking of the recent Swampflix favorite The Plague, which was also about the cruelty of teenagers, and how subtle that film is in comparison to this one. It’s a more interesting story to tell about how boys can be cruel to one another within social environments that should protect them, how they manage to inflict physical and emotional damage while skirting adult surveillance. There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled over the years about the correlation between reactionary Western politics and the torture porn genre, whether it be as a reckoning with the guilt of War on Terror-era torture politics or the more cruel, xenophobic instinct to see harm inflicted on others in the wake of national tragedy (i.e., Hostel). Although there is some comparison to the American torture porn wave in the rise of New French Extremism, I hadn’t imagined that the British film industry had their own take on the genre, which also happens to be politically reactionary, and it can’t afford to be subtle. Our unfortunate protagonists are too perfect, a sweet, beautiful kindergarten teacher and her chiseled diver boyfriend, and as they leave the city, we hear the voices of different women calling into a radio show to complain about their unruly children and their positions on the contemporary discourse around “Broken Britain,” a phrase coined by Conservative Party member and future Prime Minister David Cameron. Before they can even make it out to the lake, Steve has already sneered at the locals for keeping their children out at the pub late at night, joking that one child “needs a—” before the boy’s mother appears to slap him, as if on cue; Jenny is horrified. Both of them have a sense of superiority over these poorer rural folk, be it on the level of mere elitism or moral outrage, and because this movie is, with intent or not, evoking fear of the lower class on behalf of the yuppie one, the film contrives to reinforce those interclass sentiments and resentments. 

I’m not siding with the teenaged killers here, to be clear. Steve and Jenny had plenty of opportunities to hightail it before things went as far as they did, sure. I would have gotten out of town as soon as I had a new tire without stopping for breakfast, and I would never have confronted a group of car thieves in the woods on my own when I could get past them and into town for help from the authorities. That doesn’t mean that they deserved what happened to them, however; it simply means that the average viewer doesn’t project themselves onto Steve & Jenny because we don’t see ourselves getting into the situation in which they find themselves. We’re empathetic to their plight, but the “Deliverance but set in England” narrative and the “demonize the poor for creating cycles of violence through child abuse” themes don’t mesh into a cohesive hole. Brett and his group of bullies are chav stereotypes, and long before his gang of criminal miscreants start to mess with Steve and Jenny, the crew is already tormenting small animals as a group with seemingly no remorse. They’re evil, and they’re poor, and in Cameron’s England they’re evil because they’re poor, and rude, and morality is in decline, and so on and so forth. The so-called heroes are so thinly written and make such foolish choices that my viewing companion stated at the midpoint that he hoped Jenny didn’t make it out, just because she was a terrible final girl. I couldn’t fully disagree, and what this means is that you’re watching a propagandistic film in which two people are hunted down while being subjected to abject misery for the sake of the misery. It appears to have been reasonably well received in its time, so maybe its politics spoke to the contemporary masses, but this one could only really be of interest to hardcore slasher (or Dimension Extreme) enthusiasts or those with an academic interest in torture porn as a genre. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

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In El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent), there is a scene in which indigenous river guide Karamakate revisits a former Catholic mission/residential school on the banks of the Amazon River. He first visited the place decades earlier, where he tried to teach the boys held captive there about their traditions, saying “Don’t believe their crazy tales about eating the body of their gods.” When he returns, he finds them long after the priest has died and they have devolved into an outright cannibalistic cult that quotes half-remembered bits of Christian scripture to support their current state of being. I wrote about this years ago (and proofread poorly, it seems), but Serpiente is a story about an apocalypse that has already happened, the total destruction of a wide swath of cultures and peoples under the heel of European colonialism. I found myself thinking about it a lot during 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a movie that one wouldn’t necessarily immediately think of as being in conversation with Serpiente, but which shares a common connection in that it spends a great deal of its runtime following a now-adult practitioner of extreme violence who was only a boy when the world as he knew it came to an end. They’re very different texts (with quite divergent intents), but I couldn’t help seeing something of the cannibalistic former wards of the church from Serpiente in Jack O’Connell’s here, and that enriched for me what was already a pretty great movie, especially for a January release. 

Our protagonist from 28 Years Later, Spike (Alfie Williams) takes more of a backseat role in this sequel. At the end of the last film, we last saw him leave the healthy infant who was born of a woman afflicted with the Rage virus before returning to the British mainland, where he was rescued from a pack of infected by a group of knife-wielding weirdos. As this film opens, we find him in the midst of being inducted into their ranks; “Sir” Jimmy Crystal (O’Connell) is the leader of their gang of seven “fingers,” all re-christened “Jimmy” in his honor. Sir Jimmy lords over the others, who have scarred the space between their eyes with an inverted cross like the one he wears, although we don’t see this forced on Spike when he manages to slay his assigned Jimmy despite his physical disadvantages. Elsewhere, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) continues his work on his macabre memento mori memorial, the bone temple of the title, while also making the “alpha” infected a subject of study, trying to see if the Rage can be tempered even if it can’t be cured. He names the alpha “Samson” (Chi Lewis-Parry) and realizes that the seemingly mindless monster has become addicted to the drugs in his blow darts, so the two of them essentially start doing recreational morphine together and listening to Kelson’s record collection. When the Jimmies come upon some survivors, most of the fingers torture them slowly while Spike vomits and writhes in emotional agony and Sir Jimmy sends one of his deputies, Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) scouting; she sees Kelson and Samson cavorting from afar and reports back to Sir Jimmy that she’s seen Old Nick, setting up a confrontation between the killers, Kelson, and his pet monster. 

I have one complaint. Williams was given a wide range of emotions to play in the previous film as Spike entered an adulthood that was as alien to him as it was to us. He was sheltered from a changing world and trained to survive, but isolated in a way that meant that his first exposures to the hypocrisies and dishonesty of the adult world made him reject it and instead attempt the impossible and bring his mother to Kelson for treatment. Here, Williams only has one mode: utter, pants-soiling terror at being forced into the service of Sir Jimmy and his psychotic acolytes. This makes total sense narratively within the story that this film is telling, but it also means that Spike has no real arc, which is bizarre since the last time we were all here, he was the main character. Here, he’s static and secondary, as this film features a much larger role for Fiennes and alternates entirely between his activities and those of Jimmy and his fingers. There’s a lot of great stuff to be mined here. Kelson’s treatment of Samson is procedural, sure, but it also allows for some excellent music choices. It’s fascinating to watch a man who’s been isolated among the bones of the dead for so long essentially adopt a zombie onto whom he seems to be projecting a lot of intent and intelligence for no other reason than that he’s been lonely a long time, only for the film to surprise us by having these actions not have been in vain. Sir Jimmy’s self-mythologizing has a lot of flair, and he’s effectively menacing and depraved that the film had me on edge for most of it. I didn’t think anything would top the electricity between him and Kelson in their first scene together, but there that’s followed up by a sequence set to Iron Maiden that I expect to be the most talked-about element of the picture. Overall, however, straying so far from Spike as our central focus necessitated a realignment of the stakes that left me less emotionally invested in this outing. 

Nia DaCosta is in the director’s chair this time around, and although I loved the way that Danny Boyle slipped back into this world effortlessly in 28YL, I had a higher opinion of 28 Weeks Later than the consensus, and that film was likewise helmed by a different creative team. Alex Garland still returned to pen this one, and although there’s a distinct stylistic difference between Boyle and DaCosta, I welcome her stamp on this overall enterprise. The zombies have never really been the point in this franchise, and (Samson excepted) the presence of the Rage-afflicted is the smallest here it has ever been, with the extreme gruesome violence on display here coming at the hands of survivors. The infected and the Jimmies have both lost their humanity, but the former did so because of the Rage, while the latter are monsters of Jimmy’s making. This has been the film series’ driving force for as long as it has existed, that man is always the real monster, going all the way back to Christopher Eccleston in the original 28 Days Later. As such, the film’s conflict is also ideological, with Jimmy and the mythology he has built around himself as Satan’s son and heir to dominion over his demons (the infected) inevitably coming to a head with Kelson’s rational atheism, within which he is able to provide some manner of salvation. That he manages to use Jimmy’s follower’s faith against them in the end is clever and satisfying, and I had a great time with the film overall. 

Where I remain most excited to see this franchise continue to go is in its exploration of the way that a disease-ravaged, isolated Britain has, in the absence of a larger social structure, devolved into a series of cults. Sir Jimmy and his crew are an obvious example, as is Kelson’s non-religious (but creepy) solo project of building his elegy of human bones. It didn’t come up in this film, but the island community from which Spike hails seems to have developed some of its own creepy rituals involving a mask, and I expect that the next film in this franchise will see that community return in some form since they are completely absent from this one. Most intriguingly, Samson’s trophy-like acquisition of human heads with attached spines and the way that he displayed them in the woods also seems like a worshipful action, although deciphering the motivation for this is complicated by revelations from Bone Temple, so we shall see. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Americans Under Siege, With and Without Context

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I recently caught a double feature at my local multiplex of high-style, high-tension thrillers about American soldiers under siege in claustrophobic locations. The stories told in Alex Garland’s Warfare & Ryan Coogler’s Sinners are separated by entire genres, decades, and oceans, and yet they both trap American soldiers in tight-space locales by surrounding them with enemy combatants, whittling down their ranks one corpse at a time. That shared Americans-under-siege dynamic puts them in unlikely conversation with each other as two feature films currently in wide release, but what really makes that conversation interesting is the films’ respective relationships with the cultural & historical context around their sieges. Warfare is so hostile to providing context that it borders on experimentation in narrative form, while Sinners is entirely about context, explaining its own supernatural siege’s relation to America’s past, present, and future. Together, they represent the two extremes of contextual explanation in cinematic storytelling, to the point where considering them together is something that would only occur to you if you happen to write movie reviews and catch them both at the same theatre in a single evening.

Assigning Warfare‘s authorship entirely to Alex Garland is a bit misleading, since he shares directorial credit with former U.S. Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza. In fact, the real-time, true-story siege thriller is most interesting for the battle between its two directors: one who wants to honor the soldiers depicted “for always answering the call” (Mendoza) and one who wants to examine them & pluck their limbs off like bugs he caught in a jar (Garland). An opening title card explains that the film’s reenactment of a failed 2006 American military mission during the Iraq War was made “using only the memories” of Mendoza’s platoon, who experienced the violent episode first-hand. After the reenactment concludes, surviving members of that platoon are shown visiting the film’s set mid-production to provide their insight, contextualizing the movie as an honorable commemoration of their service & sacrifice during the harshest conditions of war. Only, that final moment is undercut by inclusion of a portrait of the Iraqi family who were also present that day and whose home was invaded & destroyed to fit the American military’s needs & whims. Earlier, when the surviving American soldiers have safely escaped the real-time gunfight in rescue tanks, the camera then lingers on that family appearing puzzled & shellshocked in the rubble of their home, as if they were just invaded by space aliens and not fellow human beings.

Garland & Mendoza’s choice to reenact this one specific mission without explaining the larger context of the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq (under false pretenses of seeking weapons of mass destruction) has been hotly debated as a disingenuous, amoral screenwriting choice among the film’s detractors. From the Iraqi family’s perspective, however, that absence of context only makes the unlawful intrusion even more terrifying & cruel. The family is sleeping in their cozy duplex when Americans kick down their doors and sledgehammer their walls in the middle of the night, inviting enemy fire into the home as a makeshift military base while they’re gathered to huddle on a single bed, powerless. There is no warning or preparation for this invasion, nor is their any communication once the fighting ceases. There’s no context whatsoever, neither for that family nor for the audience. All that’s offered is a dramatic reenactment of the gunfight from the surviving American soldiers’ perspective, with the flattering casting of young Hollywood hunks like Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai to help sweeten the deal for those who “answered the call.” The absence of testimony from the Iraqi citizens invaded, shot at, and displaced by those soldiers’ mission becomes glaring by the final credits, though, and the questions that absence raises hang heavy in the air. I like to think that unease was Garland’s main contribution to the picture but, without context, I can only guess.

The political & historical context behind the all-in-one-day siege plot of Sinners is much easier to parse, since Ryan Coogler is much more upfront about what he’s saying through his art. The director’s fifth feature film (all starring career-long collaborator Michael B. Jordan) and his first not adapted from either pre-existing IP or real-life events, Sinners is set in a 1930s Mississippi overrun with bloodsucking vampires. You wouldn’t guess the vampire part in its first hour, though, which is mostly a getting-the-gang-back-together drama about two former soldiers and current booze-runners (twins, both played by Jordan) who return to their hometown to set up a juke joint for Black patrons during Prohibition. After a long stretch of friendly “Look what the cat dragged in” reunions (featuring consistently dependable character actors like Delroy Lindo & Wunmi Mosaku), the juke joint proves to be a communal success, if not a financial one. Unfortunately, the party gets to be a little too lively, which attracts the attention of white, vampiric interlopers (led by the consistently intense Jack O’Connell). The vampires are particularly attracted to the transcendently beautiful blues music played by the juke joint’s youngest employee, Preacher Boy (newcomer Miles Caton), which introduces an unignorable cultural appropriation metaphor to the vampires’ violent desire to be let inside the party. More practically, it also sours the vibe of the evening by trapping the partygoers in a single location, waiting to be drained of their blood and assimilated into the vampire cult.

Sinners is a truly American horror story, a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. Every detail of the story that isn’t character-based drama registers as commentary on American identity: the illusion of freedom, the fixation on money, the compulsory Christianity, the lingering infrastructures of slavery & The Klan. The only positive touchstones of American culture are, in fact, Black culture, as represented in a fish-fry dance party that offers a Mississippi farming community a few hours to cut loose before returning to a life of poverty & backbreaking labor . . . until the party attracts vampiric outsiders who want to claim that culture as their own. In one standout sequence, Coogler extrapolates on this idea to visually & aurally lay out how the Delta blues that Preacher Boy is playing in the juke joint is foundational for all fundamentally American music & pop culture, illustrating its connections to funk, rock, hip-hop, bounce, and beyond in a physical, impossible embodiment of the story’s context. It’s a moment that not only accomplishes everything Baz Lurhman’s Elvis picture failed to do across 150 extra minutes of runtime, but it also positions Sinners as one of the most distinctly American vampire stories ever told on screen (among which I suppose its closest competition is Katherine Bigelow’s Near Dark).

The only dramatic context Warfare provides before kicking off its real-time siege sequence is a brief moment where all soldiers involved are watching a pop music video on a shared laptop, laughing at its over-the-top sexuality & pelvic thrusts. There’s just enough time allowed to that scene for the audience to discern a few key soldiers’ personalities through body language & facial expressions, before they’re immediately shown breaking into and destroying a sleeping family’s home. In contrast, Sinners spends the first half of its 140min runtime getting to know the gangsters, players, and partiers it eventually puts under vampiric siege, so that they feel like real people instead of walking, talking metaphors. It’s through that sprawling attention to context that we learn that the booze-running twins who open the Mississippi juke joint were WWI soldiers before they became gangster contemporaries of Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago. Even after the siege story is officially over, Coogler can’t help but pile on more context about cultural vampires & the blues, dragging the setting into contemporary times with a surprise guest appearance by blues legend Buddy Guy. Normally, I would say less is more when it comes to a movie explaining its own themes & context, but Coogler overcommits to those explanations to the point of academic scholarship, while still managing to deliver a fun & sexy vampire movie in the process. Meanwhile, Warfare‘s deliberate aversion to context threatens to implode the entire project, with only a few stray shots of Americans viewed from an outsider’s perspective affording it any sense of artistic or political purpose.

-Brandon Ledet

Little Fish (2021)

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As if it’s not already embarrassing enough that I’m a fully grown adult who treats every episode of the teens-in-peril melodrama Euphoria as appointment television, I have also spent a lot of my pandemic downtime watching its aughts-era prototype Skins for the first time.  Skins was an even more chaotic show than Euphoria in both its drama and its artistic quality, but I very much enjoyed catching up with its ludicrous teen-hedonist fantasies in recent months.  Maybe the most surprising thing about Skins is that—despite being a lasting cult favorite for horned-up, pilled-out Millennials—it didn’t launch many superstar careers for its revolving cast of troubled, adorable teens.  Dev Patel, Daniel Kaluuya, and Nicolas Hoult are obvious major exceptions, but for the most part the Skins cast have grown up to be anonymous character actors on cable television (or, worse yet, in years-delayed fantasy movies about lovelorn mermaids).  The one omission from that list that baffles me most is Jack O’Connell, who played James Cook on the show’s second “cycle.”  Cook just felt like a star, even more so than the three lucky kids who became one (judging by their work as scrawny youths, not talented adults).

My favorite episode of Skins involves Cook winning a Class President election on a platform of pure anarchy, essentially tearing the school down in raucous celebration.  Jack O’Connell was such an infectiously chaotic screen presence on the show that it was inevitable Cook would drive the student body into a collective, decadent frenzy – a perfect tonal counterpoint to that episode’s melodrama romance A-plot.  Apparently nihilistic chaos was his default mode off-screen at the time as well, as his rampant substance abuse & party-hard lifestyle kept O’Connell in British tabloids for pretty much the entire time he was filming Skins in Bristol.  I didn’t know anything about his personal life while watching the show, but a lot of what makes Cook such a compelling character is the authenticity of his chaotic presence, so that off-screen bad boy reputation makes total sense.  That’s why it was such a relief to see O’Connell pop up in the much calmer, more cerebral sci-fi romance Little Fish from last year.  I was honestly a little worried about his long-term health after seeing him play Cook, so it was just great to see him out there doing well, getting work, looking sharp.

Little Fish is one of those eerily pandemic-appropriate movies that happened to come out at the “right” time despite filming pre-COVID – joining the likes of Spontaneous, The Pink Cloud, Vivarium, and She Dies Tomorrow.  Olivia Cooke narrates as the heartbroken lead: a young vet with an art photographer husband (O’Connell), both of whom are living through a near-future global health pandemic that causes the infected to lose their memory en masse.  It’s like a viral, involuntary version of the Eternal Sunshine procedure, where two people who are very much in love are horrified by the idea that they will soon forget each other; then we gradually watch it happen.  Little Fish is almost too grim to enjoy while a real-life global health pandemic lingers outside, since it’s the kind of sci-fi heartbreaker that asks questions like “When your disaster is everyone’s disaster, how do you grieve?”  Since it was adapted from a 2011 short story and wrapped production in 2019, you can’t fault the film too much for how bleakly it recalls life & love during the COVID-19 pandemic (although there is a morbid humor to COVID preventing its planned premiere at Tribeca in 2020).  Considered on its own terms outside that unforeseeable context, it’s a great little doomed romance with a mild sci-fi bent.

There’s a lot to admire about director Chad “Morris from America” Hartigan’s visual playfulness here.  He tells the story through a fractured, remixed timeline that evokes the slipperiness of even a healthy memory; and he subtly erases or mutates the details of replayed scenes to illustrate those memories fading forever.  He also finds ways to visually amplify the story’s romance (most notably in an intimate sex scene illustrated in De Palma split screens) and global-scale panic (most notably in the ominous military presence that rumbles outside) without drawing too much attention away from the core dramatic chemistry between Cooke & O’Connell.  For me, it’s O’Connell who’s the real draw here, but only because I was so recently fascinated with his performance as James Cook.  Like with Cook’s authentic onscreen chaos, his performance as the memory-drained husband reads as an authentic portrayal of a former addict who’s gracefully gotten his shit together, only to lose all that personal progress to a pandemic that’s out of his control.  O’Connell’s wonderfully effective in the role, so much so that I’m willing to forgive his flat approximation of an American accent.

I’ll spare everyone the embarrassment of trying to guess what future stars are currently brewing on the Euphoria cast, since I’ve already been extremely unfair in preemptively declaring the vast majority of the Skins kids culturally irrelevant.  They’re all still young; there’s plenty of time, as long as they take better care of themselves than the self-destructive characters that made them semi-famous.

-Brandon Ledet