Mercy Falls (2023) - Promising start, but...

We all know the movie trope about the group of friends who goes into the remote cabin in the woods and falls foul to... [insert your own bad-guy here] and gets picked off one by one.  For that, 'Mercy Falls' offers little new.  This time it's a group of twenty-somethings who goes hiking in the Scottish mountains because the main girl's father left her a cabin after he killed a horse.  Or something.  I didn't get that bit, but it's kind of academic, as they pick up a mysterious female hitchhiker along the way.  From that point on, things don't go that well.

Despite nothing out of the ordinary in terms of premise, I soon got into it.  Maybe I'm a sucker for wild, open wilderness as a backdrop (think 'Middle Earth' in 'Lord of the Rings') and the Scottish highlands were well-used to create a sense of isolation.  Plus the characters were nice enough.  Sometimes you wonder how these groups of friends ever got together in the first place as each one seems so different, but here you get the sense that the could well hang out together in real life (although perhaps they were too similar as I had trouble telling any of the three men apart, meaning when bodies started to pile up, I had no idea who was gone!).

However, the story took a major stumble for me midway when one character makes one of the stupidest decisions I've ever seen in a horror movie (and that's saying something!).  The scene is played out like some magnificent gesture of self-sacrifice, yet he didn't have to die at all and could have easily survived and got away, but chose to do something daft when he didn't have to.

But I pressed on.  The overall story was decent enough to warrant suspending my disbelief on that one little thing.  The problem was that is starts to drag at about the three quarter mark and you start checking your Instagram feed waiting for the inevitable final showdown to occur.  The film is about quarter of an hour over the usual hour and a half runtime and this is the point when it really feels it.  When it does, it too is a fitting enough end to a basically competent tale.

'Mercy Falls' is nothing new, but it should entertain for the most part.

6/10 Should probably keep you awake if Freddy Krueger was haunting your nights