Running Scared

In Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared, sprawling, suburban New Jersey assumes nightmare proportions for two young boys: Nicky and his Russian neighbour Oleg are inducted into a netherworld of mobsters, prostitutes and paedophiles. Just as Kramer’s previous film The Cooler (2003) hinted at an almost magical dimension existing alongside the vicious pragmatism of a Vegas casino, for the stray friends in Running Scared gangland resembles an iniquitous fairytale realm, albeit one beyond even the darkest imaginings of the brothers Grimm.

The ostensible protagonist is Nicky’s dad Joey, a bottom-rung gangster forced to trawl his neighbourhood in search of Oleg, in order to recover an incriminating .38 that the boy has stolen from his basement. Perhaps we are intended to sympathise with Joey. Like the majority of the film’s adult characters, however, he’s so self-serving, volatile and brutish, that our point of identification transposes to the pre-teens. It is from this wide-eyed perspective that we bear witness to unending acts of violence. Foremost is the moment when Joey is held down on an ice rink while a hockey puck is hit repeatedly at his face.

Kramer’s breakneck visual style is similarly bludgeoning. Captured in a frenzy of flashy sound editing and ricocheting camera movements, Running Scared plays as an interminably sustained crescendo. There is no time for the sense of enchantment or mystery that would have legitimised Kramer’s pretensions to fairytale; the film passes in a vertiginous blur of comic-book hyper-reality, leaving an end-title sequence, which recasts the narrative’s main events in Lemony Snicket-esque tableaux, to exhume this subtext.

Running Scared’s most chilling scene occurs when Oleg takes refuge in the back of a van, where he is found and taken home by an outwardly altruistic, middle-class couple. The pastel interiors of their bungalow provide relief after the strip joints and dives encountered thus far, but seem increasingly hellish as full realisation of the pair’s heinous intention dawns. As Oleg locks himself in their bathroom and tries to phone for help, we see frightful flickers of an emaciated Nosferatu-like shadow across the walls. This is a sequence of gut-churning horror. But it is included with disturbing casualness by the film-makers, as just another twist in their nocturnal picaresque, or to establish a hierarchy of immorality that will excuse the nastiness elsewhere.

This review features in the March 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Wild Country

Interrupted by a feral shepherd while answering the call of nature deep in the wilds of Scotland, a teenaged girl tells her fellow hikers: ‘I don’t think we should stay here tonight.’ The remark is more pertinent than they are aware: the moment is intercut with footage of the shepherd’s messy evisceration by an unnaturally large wolf. This implies a knowingness about the clichés of the horror genre reminiscent of the flippant postmodernisms of Wet Craven, yet Wild Country – the brisk feature debut of writer Craig Strachan – actually starts out with a low-key social realism closer to the work of Ken Loach.

Beginning with a close-up on the pained face of young Kelly Ann (newcomer Samantha Shields) as she gives birth to the child she will surrender for adoption, the opening scenes are lent a naturalistic immediacy by handheld camerawork and earthy dialogue delivered in thick Glaswegian burr. There is no gruesome prologue to hint at what is to come, just an eerie Burtonesque title sequence drifting in stark, graphically rendered woodland. Not until Father Steve (Peter Capaldi) drives Kelly Ann and the other young hikers in his charge through bleak terrain to the drop-off point at the start of their walk does the film adopt a spooky tenor. As the priest relates a legend of local cannibalism to his incredulous passengers, his eyebrows distort in the rear-view mirror as if in the throes of lycanthropic metamorphosis.

He might, perhaps, just as well tell them about the family of werewolves that ravaged the platoon of soldiers on an exercise in the Scottish Highlands in Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers (2002), Wild Country’s closest recent forebear. The long scenes in the dark in Marshall’s film were leavened by sequences simulating lupine night vision. When night falls in Wild Country, there is not even a full moon to illuminate proceedings; the onset of the wolf’s horrific attacks is shrouded in a sable blackness, which only occasional spurts of garish blood brighten. With the teenagers getting fatally mauled one by one, the challenging combination of broad regional accents and visual opacity makes the story’s central third bewildering.

In other ways this murkiness works to advantage. Sudden, barely perceptible movements in the grass, disclosing the approach of the wolf through the darkness, induce a palpable chill. Restricted vision also delays full sight of the rather hokey creatures: SFX designer Bob Keen’s wolf effects are less convincing than those he created for Dog Soldiers. Roaming on all fours (it is not clarified until the final scene that the wolves are mutant), the predators’ bulbous, latexy snouts whiff of artifice. When Kelly Ann, her ex-boyfriend and the rescued foundling that may or may not be the couple’s own child seek shelter in the branches of a tree as dawn breaks over an open moor, a visually rich moment is made incongruously humorous by a daylight glimpse of the snuffling werewolf circling beneath.

Yet this nascent family unit gives Strachan’s film a human interest utterly lacking in the relentless Dog Soldiers. The awakening of Kelly Ann’s maternal instinct offers an engaging counterpoint to the capricious bloodletting. So it’s difficult not to feel cheated by the shift in tone of the climax, when Wild Country itself metamorphoses, succumbing to a different form of lunacy with an awkward lurch into farce.

This review features in the March 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.