Wilderness

A bloody slice of survival horror in which ‘Scum’ meets ‘Dog Soldiers’, with a side order of ‘Lord of the Flies’. Following the suicide of the much-bullied Davie, jaded warder Pertwee and a volatile bunch of young offenders – psycho Steve, dumb sidekick Lewis, loner Callum, joker Blue, his pal Jethro and wimpy Lindsay – are sent to a remote, uninhabited island on a character-building exercise. Genre fans will recognise the formula: a group ventures into alien territory and bad shit happens. These tough city kids are at the mercy of the unfamiliar rural environment, even before a mystery attacker unleashes a pack of killer dogs and a sheaf of crossbow arrows. And as their camouflaged assailant knows all too well, this threat from without is exacerbated by the explosive tensions within. Taut and visceral, ‘Wilderness’ is a marked improvement on director Michael J Bassett’s muddled debut feature, ‘Deathwatch’, thanks, one suspects, to Dario Poloni’s bleak, misanthropic script. But this is also the film’s Achilles heel: some may find it hard to care about the fate of these selfish, hateful toe-rags.