One of the most terrifying movie moments of 2008 occurs early in the new
British thriller Eden Lake. Kindly, middle-class thirtysomething
Steve (Michael Fassbender) is lounging by the titular Midlands lake with his
girlfriend and prospective fiancée Jenny (Kelly Reilly). Their tranquillity
is disturbed by the deafening boom-box and roaming Rottweiler of five local
hard-knock teens. Steve decides to do the unthinkable – ask them to turn
their music down! It’s a heart-stopper of a scene and, as he walks
tentatively over to the stony-faced gang, every fibre in the being of every
single audience member screams out: “No, Steve, don’t do it! Leave them
alone!”
That Steve ends up beaten by the gang, tied, gruesomely tortured and has his
“happy-stabbing” recorded on their mobile phones is testament both to the
power of slick horror film-making and that the best contemporary screen
villains are now not psychopaths and mutant zombies but contemporary British
youth. The hoody has made it to the big screen and we should be scared.
“This is a film that has hit its moment,” says Richard Holmes, the producer of Eden
Lake. “It has resonance with a youth crime phenomenon that’s not going
to fade away. We are probably the first film out there of this type,
although there’s quite a few in the pipeline.”
The movies that Holmes is referring to are Donkey Punch and Better
Things. The former focuses on a group of hedonistic youths who turn a
drug-fuelled sex orgy into a homicidal killing spree; the latter is about
heroin-addicted teens in the Cotswolds. They are movies that, if not quite
demonising youth culture, certainly express a profound unease with what they
see around them. And they are films that seem to mainline scandalous
“Facebook teen orgy” headlines and daily knife crime tragedies directly into
their narratives. Indeed, the Eden Lake scenario has an eerie and
disturbing similarity to the murder last year of Gary Newlove, the
Warrington man kicked to death after intervening in teen vandalism.
His murder happened after the film was made, says James Watkins, the
writer-director of Eden Lake, but he feels that his movie is tapping
into something that’s in the ether. It’s ultimately a fear of children, he
says. And it’s everywhere. “Recently, some kids passed my place with a
pitbull terrier,” he says, “and it crapped right outside my house. I was
pretty much standing there in front of them, and I thought: ‘Should I say
something?’ And I didn’t because it wasn’t worth it. And it was probably the
right decision. But when did standing up for common decency become the wrong
decision?”
Similarly, David Bloom, the co-writer of Donkey Punch, says that his
film was inspired by looking at youth culture and seeing “a change in sexual
morality and behaviour that I just didn’t understand”.
His film’s title refers to a mythical sex act, derived equally from the
internet and from playground chatter, in which a sexual partner is
surprised, mid-coitus, by a punch to the back of the neck, thereby inducing
involuntary muscular spasms and limitless pleasure all round. In the film,
it is committed by young English thrill-seekers on a yacht off the coast of
Spain, but with fatal consequences. The resulting chaos, like a cross
between Dead Calm and Lord of the Flies, shows the remaining
party kids, male and female (including Jaime Winstone and Nichola Burley)
turning on each other ever more gruesomely.
“We weren’t trying to scandalise,” Bloom says. “We didn’t want people to go,
‘Oh my goodness, look at those awful kids!’ We just wanted to make a film
that showed how it’s a complicated thing to be young now.”
Better Things, the debut feature from the writer-director Duane
Hopkins, also takes a hard look at life in smalltown England, and of how
disaffected teens have turned to Class A drugs to overcome the lack of love
in their lives. It opens with a fatal overdose and doesn’t get any brighter.
But isn’t there a danger that these movies will appear crass and
opportunistic, piggybacking on media obsessions for the sake of cheap
thrills? Watkins thinks so. “I’m nervous that there are all these horrible
things going on around us and that we’ll be seen as glibly exploiting them,”
he says. “But I hope that I’ve made a film that plays to wide audiences but
will also be troubling to them. And it should be. I’ve seen people come out
of it looking quite battered.”
On the other hand, Angus Lamont, the producer of Donkey Punch, says
that his movie is just holding up a mirror to society. “We’re representing
something that’s already here, rather than creating it,” he says, and adds
that the notion of rebellious youth is hardly a new one. “There’s always
been a degree of moral panic, where older people are scared of younger
people,” he says. “I think young people have always been demonised. But I
don’t see our film in that category. It’s a genre film.”
The irony, of course, is that these films work precisely because of their
social context, and not despite it. They are beautifully shot and intensely
acted, yes, but it’s their queasy approach to youth culture that gives them
their fascinating attraction. We’ve had troubled youth movies in the past,
everything from The Blackboard Jungle to Clockwork Orange to Kidulthood,
but this bold marriage of topicality and slick genre for-matting is
startling and defiantly unHollywood.
“You can’t just walk away from our film and go, ‘Oh it’s just a monster
movie’,” Watkins says. “It has a sense of reality about it, and it’s
English. And I don’t want to sound like I’m being preachy, but if people
discover a moral voice in the movie then that’s fantastic, because it’s in
there too.”
Hollywood, meanwhile, ever averse to reality and moral voices, continues to
peddle teenage delusion in the form of loveable wiseacres such as Charlie
Bartlett and Juno – the latter’s Oscar spoils seems to hint at a
certain kind of wish-fulfilment within the American Establishment. It’s
hardly surprising, then, that Hollywood is behind that other teen talking
point of the British summer season, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging.
Adapted from the Louise Rennison’s novels, funded by Paramount Pictures, and
set in an England of chaste teen kissers, it is as authentic as Beverly
Hills and as English as Madonna.
But lest you think it’s all gloom, and that these new homegrown movies are
luxuriating in their own nihilism, Watkins at least feels that Eden Lake
offers a note of hope, or instruction, for the nation’s generation of
adolescent sociopaths. “I don’t want to overstate any of this,” he says,
“but it’s very deliberate that in the film the very first and the very last
act of violence that you see on screen is a slap perpetrated by a parent on
a child.”
Thus, in a closing twist worthy of a genre thriller itself, the real villains
are not the hoodies, the heroin addicts, the hedonists and the
donkey-punchers taking to our screens, but their negligent parents. Holmes
agrees. “It’s not about messages or lessons or political statements,” he
says. “It’s about how you bring up your kids. Basically, we’re saying: ‘Know
where they are’.”
Donkey Punch opens on July 18. Eden Lake opens on Sept 5. Better Things is
released later this year
Hmm, how can Eden Lake be self-declared as the first film to be dealing with such subject matter when the very similar UK short film Soft by Simon Ellis has been winning festival awards for well over a year now...?
Danny, Toronto, Canada
" We just wanted to make a film that showed how it’s a complicated thing to be young now.”
The same old excuse trotted out by all young idiots obsessed with the "romance" of a victim complex and pretending they come from the Bronx.
Pathetic.
Alastair, Alicante, Spain
Surprise, surprise! Should anyone be surprised, given the flacid and trendy religious, political, and cultural "leadership" in the UK and the West in general?
James, Jacksonville,
" We just wanted to make a film that showed how it’s a complicated thing to be young now.”
This made me laugh out loud. Most young peoples lives aren't complicated by finding themselves on a boat with dead bodies in a "Lord of the Flies" type situation.
Dan Wright, Portsmouth, England
Interesting point made about whether you should get involved. I saw four youths attempting to steal a road sign recently and did nothing. Same kind of rationale - it didn't seem worth the possible downside, because they looked stupid and potentially vicious. Burgess saw it coming with C'Work Orange
Peter Johnstone, Christchurch, New Zealand