‘Oh and Rhona … remember, the secret is to never look back,” says sinister hitchhiker Carla (Nicolette McKeown), as she climbs a cliff. “You mean down,” someone corrects her. Yes, we get the point, given that half the characters in the film are nursing past traumas, from random acts of rural brutality to Middle Eastern combat theatre flashbacks. But such is the unsubtle way of Ryan Hendrick’s overblown Highland horror; it can’t settle for simply being a stripped-down descent into wilderness atavism. It also chucks in an irrepressibly horny crew of hikers, creepy Scottish folktales and gratuitous Homeric quotations for good measure.
The real killer is the highly implausible instigating incident. Rhona (Lauren Lyle) and pals set off on to the moors to locate the family cabin she has been bequeathed, despite grim memories of the area. But then tensions, especially simmering sexual jealousy, rise when they lose their bearings and combat veteran Carla takes matters into her own hands. It’s not really clear why she takes such drastic action, other than the need – with her insistence that they are now bound together by this terrible event – to get these sorry daytrippers marching even further towards backwoods peril.
Mercy Falls makes basic errors of dramatic orientation: mistaking characters’ bedhopping designs for personality traits, letting them act irrationally in service of the plot (solo toilet trips, or example, would seem like a no-no). But Hendrick does undeniably have a feel for the terrain, filming the glens, crags and heaths lovingly in interludes between the bloodletting, occasionally using the illusion of a diorama, making lifesize things look miniature, to queasy effect.
It inevitably boils down to what you might call a Scottish version of Predator, only with a woman in Gore-Tex instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Carla’s unhinged, keffiyeh-wearing fugitive instead of old crabface. But at least Carla has the good grace to knock off the ensemble in ascending order of acting ability, leaving this contrived trek resting in the steady hands of Lyle, who always underplays with an intriguing resoluteness.
• Mercy Falls is released on 1 September in UK cinemas and on 9 November on digital platforms.
