Rating: 2.5/5
Oh My Horror 2025 | 25/52 | Summer Scares
They're just children!
Jenny is a schoolteacher who works with children in the 4- to 6-year-old age range, but I’m not sure. She’s pretty good at giving them structure, and the kids are generally obedient. The week ends, and Jenny meets up with her partner, Steve, who is planning to propose to her on their weekend getaway to Eden Lake. The lake was once a quarry, and developers plan to build a gated community over it, so this weekend is one of the last times to see it in its idyllic beauty. During their car ride, they stop at a traffic light. When it turns green, a group of kids speed by on their bikes, narrowly missing Steve’s SUV.
Jenny and Steve have some encounters with the locals that aren’t to their liking—loud kids, a stolen parking space, an inattentive barkeep—so the two bond as they mimic Essex accents. When they finally arrive at Eden Lake, the place is surrounded by a high gate and chained doors. They find an opening where the developers haven’t finished building the gate and drive in. At the lake, some other teens show up, put on some music, and bring their dog. You know, stuff folks do at the park. Steve tells the kids to turn their music down and watch their dog. The teens ask him to fuck off. Jenny proposes moving, but Steve has something to prove.
The kids leave, and Steve sets up a tent. As night falls, Jenny spots something in the woods, but Steve assures her it’s nothing. The following day, they find their tire blown—a prank from the kids. Steve tries to chase them down, but Jenny gets him to give it up so they can grab breakfast. Steve spots the kids’ bikes outside a house. So, he ENTERS THE HOME looking for the kids. The owner comes home from work, and Steve must hide, so he GOES UPSTAIRS, barely escaping through the window and hurting his foot in the process. They get back to the beach, where Steve sets up his proposal, but Jenny discovers their beach bag with the car keys is missing. The car is missing.
How will Steve and Jenny handle this? Not well!
We get a sense of the film’s conservative leanings early on. While Jenny sleeps in the car, Steve listens to a radio piece about anti-social behavior in youth, citing Tony Blair’s Respect agenda from 2005, which was Blair’s method of bringing “a proper sense of respect to schools, communities, towns, and villages.” This proposal included pushing Anti-Social Behavior Orders, a favorite of Blair that harkens back to his first term, which heavily policed behavior on the streets. The idea was “law and order,” and the result was targeting less-well-to-do people and people with developmental disabilities. It also had orders to get parents to sign contracts, which forced them to attend parenting classes—more on this point in the SPOILER ZONE below.
Where does the film land on it? In true hixploitation style, Steve is an asshole to locals and complains about it. But because we need a reason to hate the locals, or at the very least be on Steve and Jenny’s side, they escalate the situation so that Steve is justified in violence, and so on.
As far as the movie itself goes, it’s fine. It’s a formula that was worn thin by the time this came out. It attempts to mirror the New French Extremity but aims to be more overtly “about something.” The gore is visceral and stomach-churning, framed mostly through torture. So much of the movie is “someone gets hurt, runs, kids spot blood, person hides.”
We look out for our own around here.
** SPOILER ZONE ** The movie isn’t just about homicidal teens. It’s about the parents who enable them. Just when Jenny thinks she has survived, she finds herself in the home of the kids and has to fight them. The parents are mirrors of their children. That is where the class issues lie — that if working-class people raised their kids properly, none of this would have happened.
Let me be clear: I have several friends who work in schools, including some who work with teenagers. They can confirm what the internet has been telling us for years: the kids are not alright. COVID quarantine took away some crucial socialization years, and already mediocre parents further exacerbated this problem by appeasing their children with devices. Kids reach high school unable to read, unable to focus without a device in their hands, and unable to handle the dopamine withdrawal required to sit in class and learn. Yes, better parenting is part of it. But being a police state about it demonstrably doesn’t work. ** END SPOILER ZONE **