Betrayal

When one young man has a stag firmly in his sights, he balks at the idea of killing it and incurs the wrath of an older man that results in a scuffle that sees another of their party shooting the bloke who turns out to be their rather brutish dad (Paul Higgins). What's equally clear very quickly is that "John" (Brian Vernel) and siblings "Henry" (Daniel Portman) and "Vince" (Calum Ross) had a masterplan that day that was designed to put their nemesis in the ground. What now occurs fills in, by way of flashback, just what drove these young men to their rather drastic course of action whilst we also discover than pops isn't that easy to do away with. With tensions now mounting amidst the dense Caledonian forest, the brothers start to mistrust each other and with tempers flaring they start to wonder who is trustworthy amongst them. Although the story is different, it reminded me a little bit of "Mercy Falls" also from 2023, that over-used the drone footage of ancient woodlands and menacing audio to substitute for some fairly bland writing and acting and a, frankly, increasingly preposterous and protracted storyline that presented us with three principal characters about whom I didn't care at all. It does try to use it's environment to create peril but once the jigsaw (I'd say a six-piece one) of the story was in place then I really did start to lose interest in what became a rather angrily procedural drama devoid of anything at all new or characterful. As a Scot, it's important that we continue to invest in domestic film-making, but endless aerials of fir trees do not, as "Yoda" might have said, a decent film make.

This film certainly cuts to the chase with a scene more-or-less straight away which has a father killed by one of his sons on a hunting trip; we then progress forward and flash back in time to find out what led us to this pivotal incident. 'Kill' does seem like a fairly bad title for a movie, as it's so basic, easily forgettable and its sure to be hard to find on Google. It's a shame, as this film could do with something to make it stand out more from the crowd, as it's a decidedly lo-fi bit of work, with very few characters and locations. For this reason, its more character-driven, yet in all honesty, these characters and their inter-relationships weren't especially interesting to me. There was a fair bit of tension between the three brothers and their abusive dad, yet the nature of their conflicts did get very repetitive and very often boiled down to them shouting at each other at close quarters. There was a bit of intrigue with regard to the flash-back scenes and the idea of discovering how the past informed the present but even then, this ultimately felt a bit half-baked a lot of the time. As a thriller, there were a few moments of tension which occasionally worked quite well, with the father figure being fairly intimidating. Overall, this isn't a terrible film exactly, but like a lot of films from the past few years, it's a bit too dreary for its own good.

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