Review: Body at Brighton Rock Is a Horror Film in Dire Need of Thrills

Appearing to recognize the flimsiness of her material, Roxanne Benjamin overcompensates with insistent direction.

Body at Brighton Rock
Photo: Magnet Releasing

Roxanne Benjamin’s Body at Brighton Rock briefly exudes a daffy comic pulse as it traces a park ranger, Wendy (Karina Fontes), showing up late to a meeting. Wendy’s boss and co-workers lecture her for being locked up in her own head, but it’s to seemingly little avail. Fontes plays the moment with likeable aplomb, and Benjamin succinctly establishes the social dynamics of the park office, though these scenes turn out to be a form of misdirection. Seeking to prove herself, Wendy accepts an assignment out in the woods surrounding the fictional Brighton Rock peak, against her co-workers’ protests. At this point, Benjamin’s film leaves the office and supporting characters behind, becoming a two-hander between its protagonist and a theoretically fearsome setting.

Compared to the setting of The Blair Witch Project, or even of a comparatively polished film like Backwoods, the forest of Body at Brighton Rock feels tamed. In fairness, this is partially the point: Wendy is a ranger lost in a park after all, and Benjamin clearly wants us to feel the danger of a place that’s touristy on the surface yet is still ultimately wild and chaotic. Benjamin also sets most of Body at Brighton Rock in the bright sunlight, deliberately playing against horror-movie clichés of dark and spooky woods at night. That ambition is both admirable and regrettable, as a film this conceptually thin can use all the gimmickry it can get.

Most narratives about people out in the wild pivot on a macho idea of pampered individuals learning to conquer their weaknesses and connect with their primordial nature. Benjamin mostly resists this conceit, recognizing its hoariness, but doesn’t replace it with anything, leaving a hollowness at her film’s center. Wendy doesn’t have to come of age, but there should be some sense of her emotional progression as she finds a dead body, spends a night in the woods, and hallucinates a variety of repetitive scares. Instead, Wendy is simply presented as an avatar for the audience, and so the plot becomes a collection of stuff happening to her.

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Though clocking in at a lean 87 minutes, Body at Brighton Rock feels padded out. Appearing to recognize the flimsiness of her material, Benjamin overcompensates with insistent direction. For instance, Wendy’s climb up a rock wall is goosed with quick cuts when a sustained shot of her against the rock would’ve been more frightening. And the score is always attempting to will nonexistent tension into being, conjuring a frenzy that simply isn’t on the screen.

One scene does linger in the memory. When Wendy encounters a bear, Benjamin underscores both the woman’s fear and the graceful poignancy of the hungry animal. This moment lacks the show-off gruesomeness of the bear attack in The Revenant and is all the better for it. Benjamin imbues her set piece with docudramatic immediacy, which lends authenticity to the film’s one insane flourish: Wendy turning a can of bear spray into a blowtorch in an act of self-defense. The largely buttoned-down Body at Brighton Rock could use more moments like that.

Score: 
 Cast: Karina Fontes, Casey Adams, Emily Althaus, Miranda Bailey, Matt Peters, John Getz  Director: Roxanne Benjamin  Screenwriter: Roxanne Benjamin  Distributor: Magnet Releasing  Running Time: 87 min  Rating: R  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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