Body at Brighton Rock Review (Film, 2019)
Wendy is a new park ranger. She doesn’t have all the training and clearances yet, but she wants to prove her worth. After arriving late to her shift, she agrees to trade jobs with her friend Maya. It doesn’t take Wendy long to get off path, lose her map, lose her way, and stumble across a dead body. She calls in for help and is told that a rescue and recovery mission cannot happen until the next morning. Wendy is going to learn on the job with an overnight camping trip spent guarding the corpse of another adventurer who wandered off the path.
Body at Brighton Rock is a horror/thriller film from writer/director/producer Roxanne Benjamin. I know of Benjamin from her work on a few anthology films. She produced for the V/H/S series and produced, wrote, and directed on XX. Her entry in XX was “Don’t Fall,” about the camping trip in the desert gone wrong. She also co-wrote “The Birthday Party,” the brutally dark comedy about a mother trying to hide an unexpected death on the day of her daughter’s birthday.
Benjamin writes characters and dialogue with great ease. The interactions between the various workers feel natural. Wendy’s arc really comes alive once she finds the body leading into the second act. The supervisors she radios do not have a lot of trust in her. Quite the opposite. Their refusal to do anything but question every decision Wendy hasn’t even made yet simultaneously pushes her to greater determination and far worse anxiety. This is a character study horror film about the accidental hero expected to be nothing more than the fool.
There’s a great sense of energy onscreen in Body at Brighton Rock. Benjamin constantly keeps things in motion. There is no resting the eye on the beautiful landscape because Wendy is not able to rest. Something is always moving, or at least it appears that way. The mind does strange things under stress and a lot of the scares come from the fear of something being just out of sight. Did Wendy really see something move out of the corner of her eye? Or is she imagining what could go wrong?
The sound and scoring on the film are excellent. There’s so much that can be done with ambient scoring in the woods and composers The Gifted don’t miss a trick. You can layer in a lot of bass-heavy synth under the sound of insects chirping and branches swinging in the wind without the audience realizing the exact patterns that anticipate scares. The gentle melodies that do come in during moments of brief triumph ease the fear of what a night in these woods could actually mean.
Body at Brighton Rock is slower-paced film for a horror/thriller. That’s not a bad thing. It quickly shifts from an almost-workplace comedy to a one-woman thriller and that space gives everything time to breathe. The woods are allowed to become their own character, developing a confident and imposing presence around the inexperience and anxiety of Wendy. The more she becomes comfortable with her surrounds, the more secrets the woods are willing to share with her. She might not have the most training, but she’s not the type to need to learn a lesson twice.
Body at Brighton Rock is currently streaming on Hulu.
