Body at Brighton Rock (Movie Review)

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

PLOT: When Wendy (Karina Fontes), a novice tour-guide at Brighton Rock Recreational Park, gets lost in the wilderness after swapping shifts with a colleague, she stumbles on a dead body deep in the woods. Did the man accidentally fall from a cliff or is he the victim of a grisly crime?

REVIEW: Upon sharpening her directorial acumen with a pair of shorts for the anthological horror films SOUTHBOUND and XX, Roxanne Benjamin has upped the authoritative ante by writing, directing and producing her feature debut, BODY AT BRIGHTON ROCK, an impeccably shot and credibly acted one-woman show, but a vapidly plotted thriller whose inert one-note storyline builds toward an unnecessarily twisty contrivance in the end, the kind likely to draw more head-scratching ire than jaw-dropping admiration from its viewers. Indeed, the conclusion of the film, which the preceding 85 minutes so thoroughly depends on to work as intended, comes across as such a calculating manipulation of everything presented theretofore, that it’s not only hard to make sense of the ending, but by then we’re almost too miffed to care anymore. And not just about the central character, but the ultimate outcome as well, which makes the whole endeavor feel like little more than a lissome, quasi-masturbatory exercise in style and performance than traditional filmic storytelling. Even still, it may be that Benjamin is more currently more adept behind the camera than she is in front of the blank page, but BODY AT BRIGHTON ROCK certainly shows she’s a filmmaker to keep an anticipatory eye on moving forward.

With a cheeky sense of irony, the film opens to the lively toe-tapper “Dead Man’s Party” by Oingo Boingo, introducing us to the sunny disposition of a day-in-the-life of Wendy (Fontes) that will soon devolve into the darkness, death and decay of a toe-tagger. Wendy is a tyro tour-guide for Bright Rock Recreational Park, an expansive mountain hiking area deep in the woods. Unqualified for advanced trail hiking, Wendy decides to swap shifts with her pal Maya (Emily Althaus) to prove to herself and her superiors she’s capable of greater responsibilities. She packs her rucksack and begins her duties, which include posting missives on how to avoid bears, treat snakebites, where to go if lost, etc. Things are fine at first, until Wendy happens upon a creepy colleague named Davey (Martin Spanjers), who causes her to lose her map. Wendy makes it what she believes is her destination, Hitchback Ridge, and tries to phone for help. Of course, she’s played so much music on her phone by now that her battery is down to six percent, which ought to induce more ridicule than sympathy in most viewers. Worse yet, Wendy spots a corpse at the bottom of the mountain-ridge, presumed to have fallen from a hike days prior.

When Wendy finally reaches the authorities, they tell her to secure the area to ensure it isn’t a crime scene, hunker down and wait it out until morning when the rescue team can locate her. Without a pinpoint location, it could take hours. Here we should probably note that, even if a phone loses power, most GPS units can still locate the last-known position of the cell. In this movie however, such probabilities cease to be, which is forgivable even if it hampers the veracity of its storytelling a bit. The bulk of the movie then becomes about how Wendy spends her night corpse-side, ineffectively investigating for possible foul play. A man named Red (Casey Adams) randomly appears near the corpse and has an eerie encounter with Wendy before disappearing even more suddenly. While DP Hannah Getz’s arresting imagery of the natural landscapes is bound to distract the eye from what proves to be a vaporous story plot, as does Fontes’ gamely central turn, it will only do so until the 60-minute mark or so. From there, the movie tries desperately to be too clever for its own good, and in the attempt to leave viewers with a thoroughly flattened sense of shock-and-awe with its poorly-conceived twist ending, BODY AT BRIGHTON ROCK almost entirely renders every event leading up to said twist as utterly inconsequential. Moot. Academic. It’s not that we don’t see it coming, it’s that we shouldn’t, because it makes zero sense within the context of everything we’ve seen before it. To present the ending in this way is to baldly claim the first 80 minutes of the movie never actually happened.

And if 90 percent of the movie never occurred, all we’re left with then, besides an underwhelmed piece of storytelling, is a mere filmmaking callisthenic. It almost raises the question, what’s the point? If the exercise alone was the point all along, well then I suppose Benjamin has proven she can competently shoot, cast and field a capable crew for a feature film (including a menacing musical score by The Gifted), but we all know that a good too great movie always starts on the page. You can make a bad movie from a great screenplay, but you can never make a good movie from a bad screenplay. Unfortunately, Benjamin may have learned this the hard way with her feature debut, as it’s ultimately the screenplay for BODY AT BRIGHTON ROCK that undermines what could have otherwise been a pretty compelling thriller. Even more the final revelation sullies all that precedes it; there are too many lulls and torpid dry spots in the film, many of which are confined to watching Wendy frolic in the sun, doing little, observing her surroundings or inertly lying around. For a movie with a one-beat storyline devoid of subplots, the amount of inactivity shown in an 87-minute movie of any genre is inexcusable. Still, with a better screenplay in the future, Benjamin is bound to show she’s part of the new renaissance of female horror filmmakers.