To say that Jeremy Lovering’s directing debut is the best British horror movie of 2013 is what one might call low praise. So let’s raise the bar: it’s one of the year’s best horror movies, full stop.
Two youngsters, ready to start a relationship — or maybe not — are on their way to a music festival in Ireland. They hire a car and decide to spend a night in a remote Irish hotel that the guy has booked online. Australian Lucy (Alice Englert) and Scottish Tom (Iain De Caestecker) are a bit like Before Sunrise’s Jesse and Céline: privileged, insecure, playful. She says a field they’re driving through “looks sad”; he teases her and says the mud looks anxious.
The hotel proves hard to find and the couple begin to panic slightly. As they move in ever decreasing circles, Lovering’s team use every inch of the noisy landscape, plus the actors’ faces (even their eyeballs and hair) to make us feel on edge. It’s scary, because it’s smart. As in Peter Weir’s brain-crunching The Cars That Ate Paris, there are several twists regarding the local population, all of which explore, rather than exploit, our fear of rural folk. And though, in retrospect, a few plot details don’t make sense, the logic holds. A man’s car is his castle and In Fear shows what happens when the drawbridge comes down…
