Very occasionally a film just does not work, and this low-budget horror is unfortunately one of those. The premise is not the problem: a sexy young woman lures six eligible young men to her family’s country pile for a weekend of romance, only to reveal to the men that they are now trapped in a reality-TV-meets-Saw farce in which they will struggle to survive. On paper, The Bachelorette-meets-femme-Jigsaw sounds potentially fun.
The biggest problem is that the film never achieves the necessary suspension of disbelief; horror films have to feel at least somewhat real or deliberately ludicrous while you’re watching them; but this just feels like student theatre. You can pick out interesting individual moments that could have been something, but you’re never inside the action, willing the characters to escape (or die).
It doesn’t help that right out of the gate it feels like the film can’t quite make up its mind how to begin. Is this a woodsy folk horror with a guy fleeing through the rain at night, or a torture porn deal with a guy shackled to a bed, or a twisted family in an elegant mansion chiller where bad shit is about to happen? It’s all three, but not in a way that feels bracing; the effect is more like channel hopping.
Perhaps if things were staged with more conviction it could work, but there’s a sense of flimsiness to much of it – sometimes quite literally, since the modest plastic cable ties and wispy gags used to restrain the unlucky young men give the impression of being highly escapable.
• Lure is on digital platforms from 2 February.
