MOVIE REVIEWS

Review by CinemaSerf

When one young man has a stag firmly in his sights, he balks at the idea of killing it and incurs the wrath of an older man that results in a scuffle that sees another of their party shooting the bloke who turns out to be their rather brutish dad (Paul Higgins). What's equally clear very quickly is that "John" (Brian Vernel) and siblings "Henry" (Daniel Portman) and "Vince" (Calum Ross) had a masterplan that day that was designed to put their nemesis in the ground. What now occurs fills in, by way of flashback, just what drove these young men to their rather drastic course of action whilst we also discover than pops isn't that easy to do away with. With tensions now mounting amidst the dense Caledonian forest, the brothers start to mistrust each other and with tempers flaring they start to wonder who is trustworthy amongst them. Although the story is different, it reminded me a little bit of "Mercy Falls" also from 2023, that over-used the drone footage of ancient woodlands and menacing audio to substitute for some fairly bland writing and acting and a, frankly, increasingly preposterous and protracted storyline that presented us with three principal characters about whom I didn't care at all. It does try to use it's environment to create peril but once the jigsaw (I'd say a six-piece one) of the story was in place then I really did start to lose interest in what became a rather angrily procedural drama devoid of anything at all new or characterful. As a Scot, it's important that we continue to invest in domestic film-making, but endless aerials of fir trees do not, as "Yoda" might have said, a decent film make.