Eden Lake is a 2008 British thriller film written and directed by James Watkins and starring Kelly Reilly, Michael Fassbender and Jack O’Connell. Refusing to let anything spoil their romantic weekend break, a young couple confront a gang of loutish youths with terrifyingly brutal consequences. Dennis Harvey reviewed the film for Variety and said that it was “an effectively harrowing Brit thriller-cum-horror pic,” comparing it to Last House on the Left and Lord of the Flies. The Guardian ’s Peter Bradshaw drew parallels with Deliverance, Straw Dogs and Blue Remembered Hills, and stated that “this looks to me like the best British horror film in years: nasty, scary and tight as a drum,” concluding that the film was “exceptionally well made, ruthlessly extreme, relentlessly upsetting.” Other critics, however, have savaged the film, denouncing it as an incitement to class prejudice against working class people in Britain. The Sun condemned the film’s “nasty suggestion that all working-class people are thugs” while the Daily Telegraph concluded that “this ugly witless film expresses fear and loathing of ordinary English people”
