A Lonely Place to Die

Rating: 3/5

A Lonely Place to Die starts out better than it ends, but still attempts to be a decent action packed survival/horror film.

Alison (Melissa George), Rob (Alec Newman), and Ed (Ed Speelers) are all climbing up a mountain in the Scottish highlands. They are on their way to meet up with Alison and Rob's friends, Jenny (Kate Magowan) and Alex (Garry Sweeney). Once the group of five is complete, they set out into the wilderness to continue their climbing expedition.

While on a lunch break, Ed begins to hear a strange noise coming from deep in the woods. He calls the rest of them over to investigate the sound, which leads them to a pipe sticking out of the ground. Once they begin to dig into the ground, they are shocked to discover a little girl who has been buried inside a box underground. Knowing they need to get the girl off the mountain, Rob and Alison split from the group in order to find help. It is not soon after, that the five friends realize that whoever was responsible for taking the child, is still lurking in the woods.

If I could only judge A Lonely Place to Die on 3/4s of it, I would definitely give it a higher rating. When the characters are within the mountains, and trying to save the girl, the film comes off as fast paced and well thought out. Once the characters make their way back to civilization, the plot begins to become overcomplicated and muddled. Decisions are made too quickly, new characters are introduced in the last act, and details seem to be either hidden beneath the chaos, or left out all together.

As the lead in the film, Melissa George does a decent job a portraying the strength and protective nature necessary for the character. Her performance, especially towards the end, is better than the writing that she was given. The names of the other actors in the film may not be as well known, but they exhibit the same level of effort to their roles as George does. Each actor is able to bring the needed energy to fill the scenes where they are trying to save the child. Their exhaustive efforts appear realistic and make those moments in the film incredibly tense.

A Lonely Place to Die is not a very well known film, and therefore there wasn't a lot of time spent on making sure the dialogue was fully understandable by American audiences. Whether they be British or Scottish, the characters have very thick accents, and that can make some of the information in the conversations easily missed. I am not judging the film for this, as it is not their fault that most Americans can't understand fast paced accents from outside their country. However, the dialect could be a big reason as to why the last twenty minutes of the film seemed confusing, or it could just have been the lackluster writing.

Overall, I was a little disappointed by A Lonely Place to Die. Based on the description of the film, I was looking forward to a survival/adventure movie, with a hint of horror mixed in. In all fairness, the movie does follow that concept for the most part, but it just doesn't really seem to know what to do with its' own material once the main concept is expended.