“Body at Brighton Rock” (2019) focuses on Wendy (Karina Fontes), an amiable young park ranger who insists on swapping assignments with a friend despite concerns that it is beyond her capacity. Wendy proves that concern is valid when she gets lost and discovers a dead body. When she calls it in, headquarters orders her to secure the area until the morning when they can locate her. Will she survive the night?
I saw the preview for “Body at Brighton Rock” and was sold. I love survival stories with unlikely protagonists. It starts off promising-stylized to match an eighties John Hughes aesthetic and triggers nostalgia with Expose’s “Point of No Return” blasting on Wendy’s cell phone as she dances and does her job. As she realizes the seriousness of her predicament, the film’s tone changes. After thirty minutes, the shifts get old. The film may be reflective of Wendy’s subjective state, but I am doing the film’s job for it because the tone changes so frequently as it unfolds that it feels as if the filmmaker lost confidence in the elegant simplicity of the premise and just started to choose its own adventure. Instead of choosing a story line, sticking to it and developing Wendy as a person whom we can relate to, like Wendy, the film cannot just sit still and winds up in a worse predicament than it had to be in.
“Body at Brighton Rock” began grasping around in a grab bag of horror genres, which I would describe as whiplash except it felt monotonous and repetitive, and I love all these genres. This film broke the “Looper” rule-each film should only have one sensational phenomenon. More than one, and we are hurting suspension of disbelief and begin to lose good will. This film suffers from the ninety-minute curse where the movie feels longer than its run time. Is she being stalked? Is there a murderer? Is it supernatural? Is it a creature feature? The film did not deliver on Chekhov’s snakes after all the signs pointing to them. Before the denouement, I lost all interest in the film. There is even a twist at the end, but even M. Night Shyamalan would pass on this revelation which can be ruined in two words, facial hair. It does not feel like a cohesive part of the story and is just as disparate as all the different genre jumps that occur in the film. If they added up to one cohesive story where each jump felt symbolic of either Wendy’s predicament or a facet of her character, then maybe it would not feel like filler, but there is no real payoff, especially if part of the ending is spoiled in the promotional art: da bear.
Besides a disappointingly dull story, Wendy is the kind of character that makes you root for the bear (Tag). Did Tag fail during auditions for “The Revenant” or reject the sexual advances from someone in Hollywood to get humiliated in this movie? “Body at Brighton Rock” is insulting to bears. Bears kill to eat, and if they decide to kill you, you’re done-not much left. If a bear attacked someone, that person would be bear food, few remnants. If that bear lived nearby, and you were hanging out near its home while it was staring at its empty refrigerator, the movie would be shorter. When the bear appears, I was annoyed on behalf of the bear, and the bear should sue for physical injuries, defamation and emotional distress. Tag was forced to throw the game!
In a traditional horror movie, she would get picked off in seconds. In the post-Buffy era, you may expect to watch her become a realistic bad ass as she becomes more self-possessed and skilled. We get neither and are poorer for it. I would have preferred a sardonic twist where Wendy ends up dead because she is a dumb ass without all the other frills. She is a flailing mess. She cannot even feed herself and is like a toddler with her supplies. It is aggravating. I am not the camping type, and I have been known to get stuck in the woods specifically on an obstacle course and needed to get rescued. I would do better. Wendy is jumpy, and she stays jumpy. During an empowerment moment, she throws away a tool in her supplies again. Wendy showed them! I hate exposition dumps but is Wendy really into movies thus the genre jumps? Why is she suspicious of most of the men that she meets, including the one that she knows? Why did she take this job? Wendy takes some action that seem more physically aggressive than the average woman would take, which I liked, but why? Since it is not customary for the average woman to do so, why is she the kind of person who can jump into that type of survival mode without bouts of pulling punches like the average person unwilling to inflict physical harm.
When Wendy does have dialogue, she seems less dumb than she acts, which saves her from being a character that you will hate. How can someone so smart act so dumb? If there was less of a chasm between her and her physicality, “Body at Brighton Rock” may have an easier watch.
Once “Body at Brighton Rock” establishes her predicament, Wendy takes inventory of her surroundings, but when night falls, the lighting is so bright that she has no problem doing it again sometimes without the aid of a flashlight. Movies need light, and I understand that we cannot have realism because if it was pitch black, there would be no movie, but when films like “Beast” (US 2022) or “The Blair Witch Project” (1999) does it, it feels less glaring because the characters and the story distract me. Because the story and the protagonist are unbearable, the little things may annoy you.
“Body at Brighton Rock” is a creature feature and a supernatural film, but the latter feels unearned. The US has a rich history of cryptids and indigenous legends. “Body at Brighton Rock” was shot at Idyllwild Park, California, which is the site of a Cahuilla Native American legend which the film never uses. Tahquitz, a shaman turned cannibal and soul keeper, stalked people in the day than hurt them at night. People trained for a year to defeat him and part of him escaped and survived the battle to hurt people to this day and appears as a large green fireball! It took me a brief Google search to find a better location rich story than the ripoffs in this movie, which may be autobiographically inspired, but did not translate on screen without more context. The area is also known as suicide rock, which is self-explanatory.
Maybe I would have enjoyed “Body at Brighton Rock” if I did not watch too many movies. A lot of people loved it, and good for them. They liked the jumps and the protagonist. It would have made a great short film, but as a feature, it needed more work.
