By Keri O’Shea
Camping is for idiots.
No, really, come on. Level with me here. It doesn’t matter how you dress it up (or indeed how many mod cons you actually need to take along for the ‘back-to-nature’ experience to be at all palatable). Fact is, we invented permanent dwellings millennia ago because living out in the elements sucks – and that’s even before we get to the oh-so special relationship between the horror genre and the whole deal. Of course, people being out of their comfort zones, trying to survive in unfamiliar terrain amongst unfamiliar folks, that’s always going to be ripe for a horror spin. But I maintain that part of the reason that canvas is so much part of the fabric of horror is because it allows filmmakers and audiences alike to emit a primal scream. We get to revel in the schadenfreude of seeing unhappy campers having an even more miserable time than they would have had anyway.
But I digress.
Black Rock takes this familiar idea as its bedrock, offering up what in many ways is the standard ‘don’t go into the woods’ theme. However, despite the familiar premise, it shows itself capable of surpassing the more tried-and-tested elements in several places and in several ways. To achieve this takes a due amount of bravery and it’s a film which takes a fair few risks – albeit making a few mistakes – along the way.
Early thirtysomethings Sarah (Kate ‘Lois Lane’ Bosworth), Abby (also director Kate Aselton) and Lou (Lake Bell) are heading to their old childhood camping haunt, the island of Black Rock, where as ten year olds they buried time capsules. Sarah, in a nostalgic frame of mind, wants to find them, so she ropes in her two old friends to help her, hoping to get them to overcome a past estrangement in the process. Still, old bitterness dies hard, and things are off to a shaky start when they encounter some other people who are also visiting the island that weekend. The fact that one of these people is another old childhood acquaintance, Henry (Will Bouvier) and his two friends over on a hunting trip, though, is a welcome distraction and momentarily defuses the tension between the girls. They camp out together, the booze flows, and – in just a second – things turn very sour indeed…
All sounds oddly familiar, doesn’t it? However, one positive Black Rock can boast is that, even when I could more or less predict where and how things were going to go, I was never permitted to simply settle into a mode and just stop paying attention. The film prevents this from happening, never quite leaving a clear enough trail of horror tropes for you to feel you can follow the path and see the whole way ahead too. For instance, by five minutes in, I felt confident I was going to dislike the female characters here, and that they were – in some way or another – going to wind up being unbelievable superwomen (I’d already seen the film described as a ‘feminist Deliverance’, mind you, which didn’t exactly fill me with confidence that I was going to enjoy this). By ten minutes in, yep, I hated the female characters; yet, the film made me reconsider my feelings on them straight after that, via the risky strategy of a red herring moment followed by an understated carpe diem which worked best when counterbalanced by the way the plot unfolded. That’s one thing the film does very well – it allows itself moments which are not neat, and this enables a few moments of uncertainty to creep in, keeping the viewer (or at least this viewer) engaged. It has a good handle on naturalistic dialogue, too, often warm and believable as well as authentically overlapping and uneven.
Black Rock is a beautifully-shot, bright, colourful film too, and that always goes in a movie’s favour when the blue filter treatment seems to be added in post-production as a matter of course. With their red hair, Lou and Abby in particular seem to mirror the autumnal surroundings in an aesthetically-pleasing way at surprising times, adding an odd picturesque note to all of the chaos which is otherwise unfolding. The acting is generally of a good standard – Aselton plays a blinder as the complex Abby – and it usually steers clear of the feared superwoman motif; there’s more going on, although the women in the film are given far, far more to play with than the men; as part of its pleasing unpredictability the plot ejects key characters whom you might expect to stick around, although this leaves at least one player who is let down by his stock characterisation, and never really being permitted to surpass it. That is a shame, as it’s moments relating to ‘the threat’ that can tend to feel ham-fisted, undermining the best moments in the movie.
And here we come to a major sticking point: Black Rock’s strong sense of ‘we’re not just making another cookie-cutter ordeal movie’ enables it accomplish a good deal, but it also adds a gloss of self-awareness to proceedings here. Because it doesn’t want to be so many things, this means it invariably is many other things; the grand notion of gender role reversal in horror like this begins to follow its own clichés when it becomes most overt, and the film is far stronger it its more subtle moments. Still, Black Rock is well-made and weaves a watchable story out of, frankly, unpromising elements. Where it takes risks it is at its best, and in this it’s definitely to be admired.
Writer’s note: beware of the trailer, which gives away the entirety of the film (sigh):