BEAR

Setting a film in a very confined space with a small role-call of characters - particularly somewhere like the woods, which are fairly featureless places - is a big, big gamble. In order to sustain interest, the plot needs to hang together well and the characters themselves had better be bringing some genuine credibility to the party. When it works, it works brilliantly: Adam Mason's superb Broken (2006) had only two characters for most of the film and took place in a claustrophobic corner of an English forest, but was incredibly engaging throughout. However, when the elements are not in place then 90 minutes-or-so can seem like a very long time and, unfortunately, this is true in the case of Bear (2010).

Two young couples - brothers Nick, Sam and their respective girlfriends, are heading to a family celebration when Nick decides to take a short cut through the woods where they suffer a blowout. They can't call for help as there's no network coverage, so they must shift for themselves - and after an incredibly lengthy tyre-change, they're ready to go. Just at this moment, a bear appears from the woods. As the group panic and deliberate what to do, Sam gets a gun out of the car and shoots at it - but after killing it, the bear's mate appears.

This time their senses finally take hold and they get back into their car. But a very angry animal (whose state of mind can be gleaned through an unusual bear-flashback) pursues them, and flips their vehicle over. They remain stuck in their car for some time as they wait for the bear to leave. When it does, they successfully get their car back on four wheels but then the axel snaps, and it seems the bear hasn't actually gone away at all.

Apart from quite realistically enacting the utter stupidity of people faced with a wild animal, the action of the film slows to a halt from here on in. Bear attacks, they wait for bear to leave, they agonise about how to escape, bear returns. It seems as if this is meant to be a tale of redemption - of a group of people who have personal issues with one another and who are now in a situation where the truth will out - but neither the pacing nor the human drama elements can bear (sorry) the weight of this expectation. The bear is part-savage animal and part-umpire to all this, for as Nick observes, bears have always been considered very sage - possibly supernaturally so - by Native Americans (yet another reason to apologise to the Native Americans: their folklore is used to prop up all manner of storylines). This particular bear even apparently brings one of the characters back to the car when he tries to escape (how?) so this beasty is evidently smart, but by just how much is left to us to decide.

The dialogue between characters may be notable in some ways, like in its weirdly modern puritanical attitude to cigarettes and alcohol whereby smoking is now shorthand for depravity (the character that smokes and drinks inevitably gets gnawed upon first) but rather contrived quarrels and conversations didn't make me empathise with the protagonists. A really strong dynamic between the human players could have made it work. Likewise, having paid for a real live bear to be on set, the animal was overused and appeared ridiculously regularly, going away and coming back again numerous times, whilst the animatronic bear used for close-ups should definitely have been kept to a minimum too. Add to this two of my pet hates with modern horror films - the old vastly overused car trouble/phone trouble motif and the fact that a female character of course turns out to be pregnant in order to be worthy of interest - and unfortunately, the film just did not work well for me.

There are few extras on this Metrodome Release although we get some trailers before the feature (Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, Gutter King and The House of the Devil), a scene selection and the choice between 5.1 digital or 2.0 stereo sound.

Review by Keri O'Shea