EIFF 2012: Brake
A mildly impressive joyride, but some staggeringly stupid twists put on the brakes
This isn’t the first Brake review to reference Buried, and it almost certainly won’t be the last. Like Rodrigo Cortés’s tense 2010 thriller, Brake locks a Hollywood hunk in a tight space and ratchets up the sticky, claustrophobic tension via near escapes and menacing phone calls from captors. At first, Gabe Torres’s feature debut is comparably effective – the boot of a car doesn’t trigger quite the same primal fears as a ten-foot deep coffin, but Stephen Dorff conveys just the right amount of desperation, and the gradual discovery of the plot his character’s mixed up in (it’s an amusing irony that a large-scale terrorist conspiracy plays out in ultra-constricted confines) is drip-fed at a nice pace. Then the film’s insurmountable flaws come crashing into view, with not one but two last-act twists of such staggering stupidity they evaporate the tension and smash in its tail lights for good measure, bringing a mildly impressive joyride to an unfortunate and undignified end. [Chris Buckle]