Break Review

• 19th Apr 2012

German horror film Break has failed to break any new ground with this tried, tested and frankly tired horror film format. When Sarah splits up with her boyfriend her friends, Clare, Anna and Rose decide that the best cure for heartbreak is a camping trip in a remote beauty spot. As the life-long friends make their way to into the wilderness we learn that Sarah is pregnant, a fact which will no doubt make the horrors to come even more appalling.

Soon enough the girls get lost and happen upon a very creepy local hunter and it’s not long before they discover that, predictably, they are the prey.

The problem with Break is that the audience have already seen the concept of blood-thirsty, inbred, red-necks hunting humans in isolated locations plenty of times before in films such as Wrong Turn, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deliverance, The Hills Have Eyes and Wolf Creek, to name but a few.  These films have been done with varying degrees of success and unfortunately Break gets nowhere near the horrifically atmospheric TCM, nor is it as original and disturbing as Deliverance.

The director, Matthias Olof Eich, allows the audience plenty of time to connect with the cast before gruesomely dispatching of them one by one, a neat trick, but one that was used in Wolf Creek with greater effect. However, credit is due to the director for the beautiful wide shots of the wilderness that jar completely with the gore and violence in the later part of the film and the contrast certainly adds to the atmosphere. It is also good to see the victims making worthy opponents, usually the victims are dispatched with great ease by the villain and often make such stupid decisions, yet the girls in Break do manage to put up a semi-decent fight. The acting appears to be passable, but it’s hard to tell when the dialogue is in a language you don’t speak, the actresses are all capable screamers and often that’s enough for a low budget horror.

There is plenty of graphic  gore and violence but the mutilation of females is apparently not enough for Matthias Olof Eich as he feels compelled to throw in a nasty little rape scene in as well. The use of rape for shock effect in horror films has become almost obligatory in the last couple of years and the presence of such a scene in Break seems cheap, desperate and unnecessary, as is the case with many films that employ this technique.

All in all there is nothing original in Break and nothing to mark it out over other films of a similar ilk. It has its moment and it’s not as gratuitous as it could be, although much of the film is still stomach-churning.

If people are going to recycle ideas then they need to add their own, original spin and Matthias Olof Eic fails to do this with Break. Worth a watch if weirdos of the wilderness are your thing, but even if this is the case there are better films in the genre…much better films.

Lindsay Emerson