It’s really more of a thriller than a horror movie, but there’s no mistaking the blinding terror faced by the principals in A Lonely Place To Die, written and directed by British filmmaker Julian Gilbey.
Five friends meet up for a weekend of rock climbing in the Scottish Highlands. While negotiating some tricky cliff business, they stumble upon Anna (Holly Boyd), a kidnapped Serbian girl who’s been buried alive in a small chamber.
Rob (Alec Newman) and Alison (Melissa George), the group’s best climbers, take off to fetch help, leaving Ed (Ed Speelers), Alex (Garry Sweeney), and Jenny (Kate Magowan) to mind the child.
Nearby, Mr. Kidd (Sean Harris) and Mr. McRae (Stephen McCole), the ruthless criminals responsible for the abduction, start killing everyone they meet, working their way through a couple of hapless poachers before cutting Rob’s rope as he dangles off a precipice known as “Devil’s Drop.”
Then they break out rifles and set their sites on the rest of the party.
Julian Gilbey does an excellent job of distributing his threats in A Lonely Place To Die. We get vertiginous mountain-climbing spectacle, causing characters to stop and muse how long it would take them to reach the ground after falling.
Anna’s burial in such a remote area is an indication that the villains are cold and cruel, not even bothering to check on the little girl’s scant water supply while she’s in the ground.
Indeed, this turns out to be the case, as Kidd plays the quiet sociopath to McRae’s raging and reckless killer.
The finale takes place in a small Scottish village during a riotous Beltane festival, the perfect cover for a violent skirmish between desperate foes. Gilbey deftly orchestrates the havoc, switching point of view from hunters to hunted, to different hunters hunting the hunters.
Sorry, there’s nothing supernatural going on in A Lonely Place To Die, but the pace, pursuit, and payoff are so far up our alley, we’re going to make room.
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