Given that it had its UK premiere at a horror film festival (Grimm Up North), Retreat’s writer / director Carl Tibbetts seemed very keen to deny that he’d made a horror film at all, continually referring to it as a ‘psychological thriller’ – which just goes to show that despite the revival of the genre amongst UK filmmakers in recent years, there are still those who seem ashamed or embarrassed by the label. In a way, though, he’s not wrong, as this is perhaps closer in tone to a film like Eye of the Needle than a straight-ahead horror tale, with snippets of Straw Dogs and 28 Days Later thrown in.

The film is essentially a three hander, with Thandie Newton and Cillian Murphy as Kate and Martin, a stereotypically troubled, middle class couple (she’s a journalist, he’s an architect) who head to a remote island for a holiday and to try to revive their relationship after the death of an unborn child. When they spot soldier Jack (Jamie Bell) collapsing on the supposedly deserted island, they take him into their home, and are told by him that the mainland is being swept with a new, 100% lethal infection. Jack begins to board up the house to supposedly protect it from infected invaders, but his erratic behaviour and aggressive style suggests that he might not be telling the whole truth, and as he tries to psychologically manipulate the couple, they soon find themselves facing a fight for survival.

You might well read the above synopsis and imagine this to be a tense thriller. But while it has its moments, the film plods when it should sprint, has a couple of howling continuity errors and struggles to convince. Bell doesn’t seem hard or psychotic enough to play an unbalanced ‘villain’ who can effectively keep two people prisoner, and while some have picked out Newton’s performance as a high-spot, I found her utterly unconvincing – she’s acting away furiously, but the sign of a good performance is surely one you don’t notice, not one that continually draws attention to itself. And Murphy is frankly wasted as a remarkably bland character who is so dull that it’s hard to care much about his eventual fate.

It’s well made though, with some great visual imagery, and the final revelations are well handled. But there’s very little here to lift the film out of the average. An interesting idea that sadly fails to fulfil its potential, Retreat isn’t really worth going out of your way to see.

DAVID FLINT

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