The Snare, 2017.
Directed by C.A. Cooper.
Starring Eiofa Forward, Dan Paton, Rachel Warren and Stuart Nurse.
SYNOPSIS:
Three friends decide to get away for a break, staying at an empty apartment block owned by the parents of one of them. However, due to various circumstances, the trio find themselves trapped on one of the upper floors, unable to call for help and quickly running out of supplies. With their sanity rapidly beginning to fracture, the trio begins to question whether some malicious force is at work, or whether it’s all in their heads.
I’m going to give you two versions of my review of the horror effort The Snare, a short version and a long version; because I think I’m best saving your time on this on dear readers.
Here’s the short version, The Snare is a terrible horror film that you shouldn’t waste your time on.
But because my flickering overlords would likely cast me into the fires of Mordor for such a short review, allow me to elaborate on my feelings via the long version, also because I really want to get across how much this film pissed me off.
This film has a small cast, largely comprised of the principal trio of Eoina Forward, Rachel Warren and Dan Paton, as friends Alice, Lizzy and Carl respectively. The two female leads are in fairness not too bad in their roles, if nothing particularly special, but this is probably just down do the lacklustre material, spending much of the film looking increasingly tired and unkempt as the character’s situation worsens.
Dan Paton’s Carl on the other where do I start with this guy, well his first lines of dialogue have him playing “Would You Rather” with an obsession with eating faeces and performing oral sex on relatives. From that wonderful bit of insight, he only gets worse, being increasingly lecherous and detestable, before coming full circle into the worst scum when he decides to rape the two women in a one particularly unpleasant, overlong and unnecessary sequence that thankfully culminates in him being strangled to death. Oh almost forgot, spoilers but really I’m doing you all a favour here.
Unpleasant scenes like this are obviously nothing new in films, but the way this film often springs unpleasantness on you is particularly cruel, especially when the rest of the film is a tedious slog. You’re so bored and rendered near catatonic by the lack of things going on for the most part, and then the film throws an unpleasant nightmare/flashback sequence or a rape at you, with these scenes that, feels like they were thrown in just to add shock value. Instead of shocking me, though, it just made me change my view from not particularly liking the film to outright hating it.
The film’s plot does not work well for a feature length film, especially one as unpleasant as this one, with the films 90 minutes runtime passing by at a crushingly slow pace. The story is also surprisingly confusing for a film as simple as this, aside from the trio trapped on the floor of an apartment complex; we have frequent nightmares involving old ladies and children in woods which suggest a supernatural influence over proceedings, and flashbacks which suggest a dark past for Alice, implicating that her father may have been responsible for some kind of abuse. But the film doesn’t really give you any implication as to what any of these things really mean, and whether or not they have any bearing on the story, I simply had no idea what was going on and frankly I didn’t care.
With a simultaneously confusing and simple plot, two generic horror heroines and one particularly reprehensible individual as your leads and just an all round feeling of tedium with sudden jolts of revolting unpleasantness, The Snare is simply a waste of time that you shouldn’t bother looking into.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★
Graeme Robertson
Originally published December 4, 2016. Updated April 16, 2018.
