Looking for a cheerful pick-me-up to take your mind off seasonal miseries? Then you'd do well to avoid The Winter Lake, a recent slow-burning suspense movie set in Ireland. But if you can cope with the mood of almost unrelieved bleakness, and you're looking for a low-budget film which is very strong on evocation of place and good in terms of characterisation and acting, then this piece of rural noir is well worth watching.
Tom (Anson Boon) is a troubled young man who collects animal skulls. He and his young mother Elaine (Charlie Murphy) have moved to a remote cottage, apparently inherited following some turbulence in their lives during which Tom slashed someone with a knife. Unfortunately, he still carries a knife and soon, in a nearby winter lake (a turlough, a geological feature more or less unique to Ireland), he makes a grisly discovery.
Elaine meets Ward (Michael McElhatton) and seeks to initiate a relationship, with minimal success. Ward's concern is for his wayward daughter Holly (Emma Mackey), who strikes up an unlikely friendship with the near-silent Tom. In the background lurks her boyfriend Col (Mark McKenna), to whom Tom takes an immediate dislike.
After a slow start, the film picks up pace and the tension mounts. I felt that David Turpin's script did a very good job in terms of developing the characters of Tom, Elaine, Ward, and Holly, and their performances did him and director Phil Sheerin justice. My main reservation concerned the pacing and the structure of the storyline, which seemed to me to be very uneven. As a result, the ending of the film is not only low-key but anti-climactic. I admire the way the film avoids the cliches of psychological suspense, but given some strong ingredients, I think that perhaps better use could have been made of them.
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