Highly Overrated But Still Good

Best movie ever!

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Swedish drama 'Black Lake' combines the vibe of 'The Blair Witch Project' with a Mexican standoff, as a group of young people gradually lose it in an isolated winter resort, driven mad by strange (and possibly supernatural) events. Unfortunately, the story defies logic: any normal person would just run away once people start dying, instead the protagonists spend the entire drama venturing on their own into dark cellars where their friends have already been killed, with predictably awful results. By the end, I barely understood the plot, but each episode felt like a repeat of its predecessor. In conclusion: not one of the best Scandi-dramas.

Had the makings of a thriller but poor writing let it down. None of the characters had any redeeming characteristics and behaved irrationally throughout. This sort of film will work as a supernatural thriller, or as one that appears to be, but turns out to have rational explanations; but if you try to have both, as this film did, it doesn't work. Poor example of what Scandie drama can be.

Johan is hoping to buy a disused hotel and ski resort in a remote area of Sweden, near the Norwegian border, so goes there with a group of friends to check it out. The resort was built several years ago but never opened because of a murder that took place there. It wasn't abandoned though; a caretaker was employed to look after the building. He isn't the friendliest of characters but shows them round; he tells them not to try to go down into the locked cellar. Disturbing things start to happen almost straight away; the first night one of the girls hears a banging from the cellar but even then the caretaker refuses to open the door. It soon becomes apparent that some people there are determined that Johan won't buy the resort but their motives aren't obvious. That is the least of their worries though. They start finding strange pictures, which look as though they were drawn by a child; then one of the girls attacks her boyfriend claiming that if she doesn't kill somebody she will die… things soon get even worse and it is clear that they won't all survive.This was an impressive chiller; the beautiful snowbound location created a good sense of isolation and the old hotel was delightfully creepy. There were some genuinely scary moments; often this was when it felt like something bad was sure to happen any moment rather than when something actually happened. The question is to whether the threat was human or something else remained for some time; although the way several of the guests suffered what appeared to be an infection in one eye before going on to behave strangely suggested the latter. The story nicely incorporated Scandinavia myths, with talk of Mylings, references historical mistreatment of the native Sami people as well as more modern motives. There are some clichés of course; Johan and his friends are the typical attractive twenty-somethings and the ending is slightly ambiguous; there is a suggestion that the survivors won't last long but they are still well when the credits roll. Overall I'd recommend this series; it is nicely creepy, has some good scares and is different from most series coming out of Scandinavia (at least that have made it to the UK).These comments are based on watching the series in the original languages with English subtitles.

When a group of good looking 20 something Swedes head off for a skiing holiday to a remote ski lodge, it turns out that more than Skiing, Schnapps and Sex are on the agenda. Unknown to them twenty years previously a family staying at the lodge had been brutally murdered. This of course means strange things start to happen. Lights flicker on and off books fly off shelves and one by one the group start acting strangely. All this and throw in a creepy caretaker and a cellar that no one will dare enter, and you have an above average thriller set in the stunning Swedish mountains. 7/10