Two brothers are driving a pickup truck out to the woods.  The camera shows us a rifles, jumper cables and flares (a huge disappointment since I thought they were dynamite until they finally came into play).  They sing The Bear Went Over the Mountain.  I’m already questioning if these guys are just brothers.  Maybe the jumper cables were nipple clamps.  I don’t even want to speculate on the flares.

What the hell, there’s a girl in the backseat.  She is married to one of the men, Mike (Ken Cosgrove from Mad Men), who is inexplicably wearing a tie to go camping.  They stop at a convenience store, and while his brother Sean and wife Wit are buying supplies, he just can’t get off the phone to work.  One of the supplies is a pregnancy test. Really, she didn’t of that before they left?

The park is closed, but they go in anyway.  Mike reveals to Wit that his brother was discharged from the army for reasons unknown.  This is the standard “Veteran = PTSD psychopath” Hollywood shorthand so he will be suspect #1 in case of any shenanigans.

When Mike and Wit wake up the next morning, they are still in their sleeping bags, but the tent, all their supplies and Sean are gone.  Also, they have X’s on their foreheads. The crazy vet Sean is the immediate suspect.  His creepy ability to move stealthily, showcased earlier, further implicates him in this unlikely theft.  Then Sean appears with the same X on his forehead.  He has been surveying the area for evidence and assessing the threat level — what a maniac!

He leads the couple halfway back towards the car which he says he can hot-wire, then turns back to rescue his dog.  Mike still suspects Sean is behind this, not some group of “constitutional extremists.”  Yeah, it was prob’ly those crazy Tea Partiers.

Sean finds one of the people who killed his dog and goes all Rambo on him; if Rambo had been 5 minutes long.  After rifle butting the guy in the head several times, he turns his back on him.  He’s not a crazy vet, but he is a stupid one.

So the rest of the film is set up with beta-male Mike and wife against the bad guys. Unfortunately, Mike is no more Rambo than his brother.  While he lacks Sean’s military training, he follows exactly the same strategy — beat your opponent senseless, then turn your back when he has a weapon within reach.

So we are down to Wit.  She finally gets a good look at these killers and they are three punk kids on bicycles.  They tracked her with the GPS beacon that Mike had given her, so she tears it off.  She gets back to the truck, but the hooligans have disabled it.  Now she is in Eden Lake mode, which has a lot of potential.

Holy crap, now this is Rambo — she sews up a wound on her head.  She takes the only weapons she has, a tire iron, jumper cables, and flares and sets out in pursuit.  I really wish it had been dynamite.  While she is more badass than the men, she ends up making exactly the same mistake of turning her back on one of them while he has a weapon within reach.

Other than that one recurring bit of stupidity, it is an enjoyable ride in the survival sub-genre.  It is no Eden Lake, but that’s a pretty high bra to reach.  Er, bar — anyone who saw Eden Lake knows what I mean.

Post-Post:

• The other bit of stupidity is using a pair of jumper cable as a weapon in a non-electrical fashion.  C’mon, from her position even a medium sized rock would have been better.
• They make room for one last “message” in the final scene which has a child in a shopping cart pointing a plastic toy gun at her.  But what is it?  Guns are bad?  Boys are bad?  Non-bio-degradable plastic is bad?  They got a threefer on that one.
• While the two dudes were OK, to be honest, I just wasn’t crazy about Wit.  I did like the character, though.  And the end, after her ordeal, she looks awful.  I don’t mean beaten and black-eyed; I mean she really looks like she’s been through hell.  So kudos for that.

Esther Woodhouse is at the doctors’s office with some sort of enormous tumor; no wait, she’s pregnant. The doctor is running an ultrasound, and everything looks good.  Of course, they told Rosemary Woodhouse the same thing.  On the way to the bus stop, she is conked on the head by someone in a red hoodie who then repeatedly bashes her baby bump with a brick and robs her.

Fortunately, it seems that an ambulance is very quick on the scene.  Not so fortunately for her or me, she regains consciousness just in time to see the bloody corpse of her dead baby being cut out of her.

A detective comes to her hospital room.  Not much is learned except that the father was from a sperm bank.  Next she gets a visit from Mary Wilkins, a social worker at the hospital.  Esther doesn’t have any friends or co-workers to contact.  By the time she gets home, even her goldfish is dead.

Esther goes to a support group.  She is befriended by Melanie who lost her husband and son when they were hit by a drunk driver.

She returns aimlessly wandering in the hospital where she was treated, does jigsaw puzzles, applies for a job at a department store.  While there, she sees Melanie and stalks her for a while.  Melanie seems to be searching for her dead son as if he were merely lost in the store.  She makes a scene, crying, calling over the store manager.  She says she is going to look outside, then calmly walks to her car.  She gets a little boy out of her car and takes him into the store.

Esther and Melanie get together again for coffee in the park.  Melanie says she used to bring her son here.

Later that day, someone in a red hoodie breaks into Esther’s house and rapes her.  It turns out to be her lesbian lover Anika.  The first attack was a ruse that Esther dreamed up.  Lot’s of lying going on here.

Melanie calls late at night for another coffee klatch.  Esther tells Melanie that she was nine months into a healthy pregnancy and loved the way people treated her.  Not being much of a looker, she was unused to this attention.  But she never wanted to be a mother.  She tells Melanie she is the only one who understands and kisses her on the lips.

Melanie gets up to leave and Esther tells her she saw her with her son at the mall.  Melanie slaps her and tells her not to call again.

I could go on and on, and actually did — damn you Chromebook for not having a backspace key!  But there are so many interesting scenes and twists that that they have to be seen to be appreciated.  I was wary of the 2 hour running time, but the film fills the time.  It is slowly paced, but there is always something happening and your mind is constantly working to stay up with it or out-guess it.

Director Zack Parker has a few amazing scenes which are Hitchcockian in their twists and in the great use of Bernard Herrmann style scoring.  Really great stuff.

Anything else would be giving away too much.  For most posts, I spoil freely because it just ain’t that big a deal (and, really, who am I spoiling?  Searchbots?).  This should be seen with fresh eyes.

Post-Post:

• Alexa Havins — wow!