Film Review: Black Rock

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I’m not sure what it is with people and the wilderness, they have a need to go out into the countryside in the middle of nowhere to discover themselves and try to fix friendships and generally escape from civilization.  What happens then? Normally they meet some psychotic killers out there who try to kill them, just like in Black Rock.

Black Rock looks at the friendship of three women Abby (played by director Katie Aselton), Lou (Lake Bell) and Sarah (Kate Bosworth) who decide to relive their childhood adventures on a remote island called Black Rock.  Believing they are on their own they relax and try to reform past friendships but are interrupted by a group of local hunters.  When things get out of control and one of the hunters are killed, the friends find themselves caught in a much deadlier hunt.

I have mixed feelings with Black Rock because there are times that I feel it doesn’t have the effect it’s looking for, where at other times it really works and you care about the characters.  The set up for the story works, we see three friends where life has pushed them apart and a desire to fix it drives them to look to the past where they were happy.  Add to that the accident that leads to misunderstandings between the hunters and the camping group, and we have the perfect setup for a deliverance style fight for survival.

My problem with the film is though that the action just feels like it is lacking the excitement that it’s obviously trying for, the force and impact of the violence just doesn’t hit home as it should.  In a complete contradiction to this though get the friends alone and talking then Black Rock finds its tone and really hits the ground running.  When this is a film about surviving and fighting for your life, this leads to a mixed bag for the overall effectiveness of the film.  We know what it’s trying to achieve but for my taste it could have done it better.

This is not to say that the acting is to blame for this, Aselton, Bell and Bosworth have good chemistry that makes the bond of friendship real and for the most part the hunting group themselves are intimidating, though the intimidation could have been increased just a bit, but I can see the problems in doing this.  If Black Rock is seen as a story about a group of women fighting against the violence against men, then to make them overly aggressive would create the wrong type of tone, where in truth there is a feeling of equality in the movie.  At no point is it focused on that the friends are female and the hunters are men, these are people fighting for survival and hunting down prey, t see it as more or to try and make it more would have ruined what was trying to be achieved.

Would I recommend Black Rock to friends, especially horror fans? Yes I would, when compared to a lot of films we see nowadays it is a lot more effective.  Yes, there are things that don’t work for me, but that could be a personal feeling based on what I’ve seen in other films.  If I was to compare it to something like Deliverance? Yes, it is not on that level  of a film that I personally see as one of the best survivalists movies ever made but moving away from comparisons and judging it on its own merits, Black Rock is a film worthy of your time.

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