A solid watch.

Rating: 10/10 (5 February 2015)

I argued with my friend recently about the quality of this film the other day. We both agreed that it was marketed poorly as a horror film and we both disagreed on the "creep factor". He told me he couldn't get into it, that it was drawn out and boring. I asked him to go back and watch it again in the middle of the night, alone and with no distractions. He came back and told me it was intense.
Turns out the problem for him was the yammering groups of teenagers chuckling and being general annoyances, sitting on their smartphones and asking their friends every three minutes "what happened?" when he watched it at the cinemas. I'm gonna go ahead and assume many of these one-star reviews are from "torture porn" aficionados hoping for lots of blood, gore and awful death scenes, or from kids who were on their Facebook pages for much of the film, because if you involve yourself in the movie, it's actually really damned good. If you catch the allegory, which I doubt the slasher/TP viewers could even fathom, then you would see the ending is quite well constructed.
All in all, for a modestly budgeted film, the presentation is great. It's bleak and depressing and cruel and not particularly enjoyable in any sense of the word, but then that's what it sets out to be; A true "horror movie" in every sense of the term. It's hard-hitting and close to home, the acting is fantastic, the production values are great, the sound editing is skin-crawling in a good way. I've got nothing but praise for this effort. Ignore the one-stars. Just watch it and judge for yourself, but make sure you watch it alone in an empty house in the middle of the night and not surrounded by teenagers on smartphones that are just going to ruin the atmosphere.