Scary Rogue Crocodile

You come to dread watching horror movies these days. Not because they’re scary, but because they’re usually so poorly made. They’re often just showing you stuff in a mirror and calling it scary, or filling the screen with blood and guts and calling it realistic. And so, Rogue comes as a refreshing little surprise. Prioritizing actual horror above all, we end up with a film that’s not particularly original or exciting, but definitely scary.

Pete is a travel writer sent to the Australian outback to write about the growing tourist trade in the Northern territories. He, along with a group of tourists, joins a river cruise down crocodile infested waters. The tour gets derailed when they spot a distress flare upriver, which they decide to follow. It all goes terribly awry when a gigantic rogue crocodile attacks and damages their boat. In a panic, they run their boat aground on a tiny island in the middle of the river. With the rising tide threatening to put them underwater, and an unstoppable predator waiting in the wings, the group must figure out a way to escape their predicament.

You aren’t going to find many new ideas in this film, but there’s some really effective horror in here. It works by keeping everything gloriously simple. A group of people trapped in one place, a deadly predator keeping them from escaping, and an external factor (the rising water) keeping them from just waiting it out. Those elements add up to some powerful suspense. The script also has the patience to not show all of its cards right away. It lets things build slowly, allowing the fear and paranoia to accrue, until it all comes out in bursts of concentrated horror. Again, it’s nothing particularly original, but it’s done pretty well.

The film is a bit of an exhibition of how horror ought to be done. Horror isn’t about seeing someone get harmed. It’s about the anticipation of someone getting harmed. This is where the film excels, but really building that air of anticipation. Director Greg McLean never lets you forget the threat, even while using the threat rather sparingly. The violence is meted out in small doses, never becoming more important than the fear of the unseen. The croc itself looks pretty good, although there’s shot of it near the end that feels kind of off.

There isn’t a lot to say concerning the performances. The characters aren’t exactly the most complex, and don’t require much acting in general. The most that you can really ask from this horror cast is to sell the fear, and they do that well enough. Michael Vartan isn’t the best actor out there, but he’s used to pretty good effect here. Radha Mitchell gets a few nice moments in there. Sam Worthington does a nice little in here as well. The cast mostly gives way to the fear, never giving in to the temptation of just hamming it up.

Rogue is just a nice little surprise. Horror movies in general have deteriorated over the last decade or so, with most of them relying on sheer shock value instead of proper horror filmmaking, or falling back on the camp crutch in order to get away from building an effective story. Rogue does it right, building suspense and withholding violence, letting fear fill the air instead of blood and body parts. It’s the kind of thing that recalls movies like Jaws, and it’s nice to get something like this every now and then.
Rating:

source: