Dead End

It's Christmas Eve and the Harrington family are making their annual journey by car to visit Mrs. Harrington's family. As the rest of the family - wife Laura, student-psychiatrist daughter Marion, annoying teen son Richard and Marion's boyfriend Brad - dose, Richard Harrington decides for the first time in 20 years to leave the interstate and take a shortcut.

Following a near collision with another vehicle after falling asleep at the wheel, the Harrington's find themselves lost on what seems like a never-ending road - the only sign of life a mysterious women in white who emerges from the forest and a ominous black hearse which appears as one-by-one members of the family are brutally murdered.

First-time French co-directors Andrea and Canepa have put together a modest, low-budget film with a good cast which unfortunately is almost wholly undermined by an incredibly creaky central premise. Whilst the film contains some good shocks, good atmosphere and some occasionally effective black humour - the "twist ending" will be obvious to anyone who has ever seen a few episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits or Tales of the Unexpected. Not only is the ending obvious from about the 10 minute point, but when it arrives it is so badly handled it almost ruins any good impressions left by what precedes it.

Almost? To concentrate on the good aspects of the film the performances are strong throughout, with only Mick Cain as Richard perhaps letting the side down as the incredibly annoying teenage son - his grating performance occasionally approaching the parody of Harry Enfield's "Kevin" character, so that a scene where he tearfully begs Marion to emerge from catatonia fails to convince. Ray Wise (Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks) and Lin Shaye (Magda from There's Something About Mary) are exceptional - pitching performances just the right side of mania, to be both convincingly under siege and blackly humorous. Alexandra Holden puts in a equally solid performance as Marion - her grace-under-pressure role grounding the more extreme moments in the film.

And extreme moments there are a-plenty. Though Andrea and Canepa wisely keep the gore mostly off-screen, what is implied is gruesome. The film approaches an almost "horror comic" level in the scene where a mobile phone must be retrieved from a mangled corpse and emerges into shot with a earring-ed ear looped onto the aerial! The film for the most part manages to balance the terror and confusion of the characters with the grim humour which their situation occasionally forces upon them - Shaye's decent into madness works particularly well.

Though the film is mostly set in the Harrington's car, the darkened forest which surrounds the road is truly intimidating and some Kubrick-style overhead shots to some suitably scary music help in establishing the isolation of the characters. One trip through the forest on foot late in the film is effective - though it perhaps borrows too much from the recent James Mangold movie "Identity", with which it also shares the central conceit of bickering characters cut off from the rest of civilisation at night. Though not descending to the level of that film in physically attacking each other, some long-buried truths emerge as the Harrington's endure the events of the evening and though this works in ratcheting up the tension it leaves you wondering what the point was when the ending is reached.

All in all, an effective, scary film - almost scuppered by a creaky central idea and a lame ending, but saved by great performances, effective settings and some dark, twisted humour.

Eliot Blades

Release date : 12 Dec 2003