Friday, October 17, 2014

In Fear (2013)

Tom and Lucy, a girl he's recently started dating, have plans to meet some friends at a festival.  It's a long drive and Lucy's friends are expecting her that night.  But Tom has booked a hotel in hope that Lucy may be interesting in a romantic night together before they spend the next few days with their friends.

Since the hotel is off the beaten path, they arrange to meet a guide at a local pub.  But the two leave the pub in a hurry, and it's not clear if Tom had some sort of run in with the locals. Luckily their guide is waiting outside in a jeep in the parking lot and the young couple follows him out to the middle of the countryside, where he points them to a dirt road.

Down the road, they find a gate with a chain on it.  Now right there, if that is me in the car, I'm getting a bad feeling about this. Their guide didn't get them to their destination, and hotels don't normally have farm type gates with locks on them. How is anyone going to stay in your hotel if they have to unchain a gate? This does not bode well.

But if our characters are suspicious, then they decide to go somewhere else and the movie ends. So Tom and Lucy undo the chain, and head down the road. They follow the signs on the twisting narrow road and get lost.  Ending up back where they started, they try again - and get even more lost.  The light is fading and the two are nowhere near finding their lodgings.  Fear is mounting in the car due to the creepiness of the roads and rundown cabin with a no trespassing sign near where they came in.

Lucy starts seeing people in the dark, but Tom doesn't believe her, which starts things down an ugly road.  Things get even more intense when they pick up a man from the side of the road who says people are chasing him.  Low on gas and with no sign of the hotel, it's not clear what is real and how they are going to survive the night.

Based on the extras on the DVD, what is most interesting about this film is that it was shot chronologically. There was no script and the actors didn't know what was going to happen to them.  They didn't know if the car would blow up, there were monsters in the woods, or they would be killed.  They also didn't know if their own characters were good or evil. This is because the director wanted them to be tense, unsure of what's going on, and they had only known each other for two weeks, just like the characters in the time.

It also explains why Lucy is always screaming, "Tom!" repeatedly.  If there had been a script, maybe she would have had something less annoying to say.  I wish I had counted how many times she screamed his name, because it's probably a hundred times.  It became really irritating and as she started to lose her voice from the screaming, it became even more annoying other than the hope that her voice may disappear completely.

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