Review: Body at Brighton Rock is a tight and effective survival thriller

The best horror films get under our skin when they have an element of real-life fright to them. The supernatural will always be a source of fascination for horror fans, but what’s scarier than being lost in the woods? While the advent of GPS and cellular technology have combined to make the world feel smaller and easier to navigate, it only takes a dead cellphone battery to suddenly zap someone out of their comfort zone, a terrifying proposition if you’ve lost your bearings out in the wilderness.

Genre director Roxanne Benjamin (Southbound, XX) expertly mines that sense of dread in her new feature Body at Brighton Rock. Wendy (Karina Fontes) is a part-time worker at Brighton Rock State Park. She’s constantly late and a bit flaky, which means she’s never tasked with working on the more difficult trails in the park. When she agrees to trade shifts with her best friend Maya (Emily Althaus), Wendy begins putting up safety flyers throughout the trail, losing herself in the dance music in her headphones, while making her way deeper and deeper into the park.

After a rigorous hike, she finally reaches a peak and sends Maya a selfie to prove just how qualified she really is for the job. Only Maya quickly points out that Wendy is not on the peak she thinks she’s on. And who is that person lying in the background of the photo? Wendy quickly realizes that she is completely lost, and that she is not alone — there is a dead body lying there with her, and a creepy hiker who clearly disregards her authority. When Maya is finally able to reach her team at the camp, they insist that they can’t safely bring her down until the morning, leaving her stranded with a dead (?) body in the woods overnight.

Benjamin does a great job of slowly ratcheting up the tension and unease throughout Maya’s night. She not only has to contend with the dead body, but all manner of wildlife after the sun goes down. This is essentially a survival horror film, with Maya forced to make her way through the night, even if she is far from qualified to do so. As the darkness descends, Maya begins hearing things in the woods — are they the normal sounds of nature? Or is someone with her? And did that body just move?

At a compact 87-minutes, Body at Brighton Rock is a brisk and efficient thriller. Karina Fontes is great as Maya, effectively communicating her fears of the situation with a grim determination to prove that she’s up for the task, even as her night gets increasingly more dangerous, and her mental state begins to deteriorate.

With roaming camera movements, beautiful cinematography, and a dramatic spaghetti western score by The Gifted, Body at Brighton Rock often feels like an undiscovered gem from the 70s. Apart from the use of cell phones, this movie could have come out anytime in the last 40 years, which lends the film a classic, timeless feel.

With loads of unexpected scares (and handful of laughs), this is the perfect late-night movie, one that should play best in a packed theatre (or in front of a couch with a handful of friends). It may not reinvent the wheel, but Body at Brighton Rock proves that sometimes our most basic fears are also the scariest. 

Body at Brighton Rock is in theatres and VOD now.