The Reeds

Poster for the movie

 **

Some films get too bogged down in needlessly complicated plot as “The Reeds” does with its “looping” device where a group of Londoners drive into the country for a boat ride down a river, meeting a boating manager who rents them to out-of-towners and tourists, encountering a second brood of teens hanging out on a yacht they hire for the day. The teens are aloof and strange, barely paying any attention to them, eventually leaving as the boating manager’s dog barks away. Soon all hell breaks loose as the friends are shaken by one among them falling backwards onto a wooden spike in the boat. Then another goes into the reeds to find help, coming upon this grisly ritual the teens are participating in which involves the brutal slaying of the boating manager’s dog near a bonfire while they make-out. Then the teens are shown running from a man in a slicker with a shotgun pursuing them. All of these events seem to imprint on the Londoners as if they inadvertently become a part of the past, despite being the present, lost within the loop themselves.

I think all of this could have worked but the execution gets a bit confusing. What is causing that blading sound within the reeds? How did the group come across a boating manager that is no longer of this world? How do the Londoners cross paths with the teen victims if they are already dead? How does one of the Londoners see himself from both inside the boat and outside in the reeds yet he’s one of the survivors? How can the boating manager do harm to the Londoners if he’s dead and they’re alive? Why does the daughter of one of his victims need to stop the curse through killing the one responsible? How can the dead grab hold of the living and harm them? Seeing the past relived is one thing but how does these events literally envelope those living in the present?

Below is something the boating manager says to the lead final girl:

You see, down here in the reeds the past haunts the present and makes ghosts of us all.

How? I guess an easy answer might incorporate elements of the Onryu genre in Japanese horror: the curse of horrible events stain those who encounter them relived anew. When you happen upon a cursed area (the reeds of a river and boatyard), its dark past can rub off on you. That is how I looked at the plot myself in The Reeds (2010). I had to find a means to clear the muddy waters that this film’s plot seems incapable of doing so properly. Peruse the IMDb message board for the movie and see how lost many viewers are and how the explanations trying to clarify what’s going on sometimes just make matters unintentionally worse. Of course, you might use the same excuse for the plot of A Tale of Two Sisters (2003). There might be this clear idea of what happens in The Reeds to those responsible for its screenplay, conception, and design, but through its storytelling the film collapses into convolution.

This was part of the Afterdark Horrorfest 8 Films to Die For IV. This was a revisit for me. I remember renting it in a Movie Gallery back in the good ole days when the entire series would show up on the New Release shelves. Each one of the eight films I’d anticipate the gem among them. Honestly, most of them just weren’t all that good, but typically every year one or two weren’t too shabby. This year’s batch, I thought Lake Mungo was the gem (although, many more found it the *worst* of the 8) while Hidden received a lot of critical praise. The Reeds was towards the middle with me. It has its moments, but not enough. You could see, though, how the reeds could be used in a horror film quite effectively. It is the looping narrative that undermines potential in the terror that might emerge within and through such a location.

I didn't spend too much time with character exposition because truly only one particular character gets much importance overall due to her ties to one of the teens killed in the past. Her romantic interest is the other character fortunate to avoid dangers the others of their gang aren't. One tragic scene has burning water (from a boat explosion caused by moronic use of a flare inside) scorching a victim hideously with her accidentally using a hacksaw on her boyfriend with him yanking it out of his shoulder wound (bright guy, eh?) and retaliating (not knowing who he is hacking away at).

Film highlight for me: caged skeletons found on the bottom of the river revealing that they were killed and put in the water.