Saw A Lonely Place to Die, a low-budget thriller set in the Scottish highlands. On a climbing holiday, five people come across a little Croatian girl buried in a wooden box. They dig her out and decide to take her to safety, but of course someone put the child there, and they’re soon in pursuit of the hikers and willing to use any means necessary to get the girl back.
For what it is, the film works very well. It’s a simple chase story with some brutal moments and as exciting a climax as I suspect you could get from the premise. The characters are quite interesting, the good guys not very likeable, the victims themselves tied to a dangerous criminal underworld and one scene with the main antagonist giving him an interesting complexity. This one, the kidnapper and apparent mastermind, was the only actor I recognised, having been in the film Creep, but that’s only because I didn’t recognise the guy who took the lead role in Eragon or the guy who was Paul Atreides in the disappointing 2000 adaptation of Dune.
Not everything worked. The exciting descent down a sheer cliff known as ‘Devil’s Drop’ worked from the perspective of the climbers, but seems far-fetched if you try to imagine the criminals’ activities during it, especially when they had big guns. The random bacchanalian festival was spectacular but…really wasn’t a very likely thing to see in a Scottish village. And again, we get the impression that a life of crime can carry on for decades until our story, when something goes wrong and suddenly there’s a huge bodycount – but mostly, everything works and the budget was well-spent. Especially those helicopter shots.
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