Wolf Creek 4K 2005 Unrated

If a horror movie made you scared and worried about the main characters, it's a good movie. If a horror movie makes you worry and fear for yourself, it's a great movie.

In an article I once read that the 18th, 19th century frightened the audience (not movie, of course) werewolves, vampires, ghosts and other evil, and it was scary, but the 20th century and in literature and in the movies brought a creature a hundred times more dangerous and scary, and it was a man. A maniac.

A creature mentally ill, cruel, unencumbered by morality and obsessed with the desire to inflict pain. The maniac in 'Wolf Creek' is exactly that, the embodiment of what we should fear most today. The many-faced Janus, a seemingly harmless villager, chatty, good-natured, helpful, but in fact he is Evil, in the ugliest, most nightmarish sense. Evil that is not obvious at first glance, and that makes it all the more horrible.

The epigraph 'the movie is based on real events' and the given statistics about missing people are already hitting the nerves, preparing the viewer for something terrible, here we sit, ready for the massacre, where is he, the maniac? And there is no maniac, the movie leisurely and measuredly shows the ordinary, everyday life of three young people with idle chatter and an excess of irrelevant at first glance details.

By the middle of the movie I began to suspect that the genre of the picture is not horror at all, and in the rental inadvertently mixed up the box for the disk. An ordinary road-movie with elements of melodrama. But as soon as my vigilance was put to sleep by a clever director's move (there is nothing better than contrast), a 'good-natured' hunter appears. Vigilance had my left eye ajar.

You don't have to be seven eyes to suspect something amiss, given the obvious fact that there is no one else in the vast expanse of Australia. Unless you were confused by mentions of UFOs and feared an invasion of little green men, of course. Still, I wasn't ready for the Monster that the 'good-natured' hunter had turned into. I wasn't prepared for the violence that followed.

The episode with the personal belongings of the previous victims made an even more oppressive impression on me than the demonstration of decomposed corpses - camera recordings (a direct message to amateur filming). The director balances the contagion on the border of fiction and documentary, he knows how uncomfortable the viewer feels when the distance between the movie and reality shrinks.

The goal has been achieved - the lives of the characters are so non-cinematic, so reminiscent of our own, that we easily identify with them. And now we fear for ourselves, because it doesn't matter whether we live in Australia or not - our statistics are probably no less rosy - we all go out on the town with friends, rarely carrying firearms or possessing close combat techniques. Speaking of which, I've never seen a better anti-advertisement for tourists. After 'Wolf Creek', I suspect the number of people wanting to travel Australia will be reduced.