Writer: Andreas Prodromour
Director: Andreas Prodromour
Eden Lodge is a British slasher movie that tries hard to do something different but doesn’t quite succeed.
The story revolves around Adam (Ben Gardner Gray) and Rachel (Cyd Casados) who are travelling with their baby daughter through the English countryside. Following the compulsory car failure they end up at the Eden Lodge guest house run by Mrs Wilkes (Ellie Dickens giving the film’s stand out performance) and her son David (James Killeen). However they’ve arrived at a bad time as there’s a serial killer stalking the woods…
Forget the summary about the people they meet being killed one by one, it’s not like that. In fact for most of the film the family are blissfully unaware that anything is wrong as the killings take place in a parallel plot thread. They only become directly involved for the final act.
Actually, forget the word ‘blissfully’ as well. Adam and Rachel have distinct relationship problems that we learn about as the story unfolds. This is handled well by Prodromou and serves to keep the interest and heighten tension where it could so easily have swamped the film with sentiment.
His direction is also more than competent and he does a great job at creating an atmosphere of menace. He’s admirably restrained: the film has a massive amount of implied violence with very little explicit gore and it has massive sexual tension with very little sex.
The problem is that the story is just… limp. There’s the usual guessing game of ‘Who’s the psycho?’, with just about all the support cast being suspicious for some reason or other. But the story itself simply doesn’t go anywhere original or even believable, even with the brave attempt at a twist. The final act is intense but, for me, the plot was unconvincing.
So Eden Lodge is a classy and atmospheric slasher with better rounded and more interesting characters than most but ultimately just another slasher.>