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