The Winter Lake possesses all the makings of a delightfully spooky psychological thriller – a desolate rural Irish landscape, a collection of strained parental relationships and a lake that hides a terrible secret. It has the potential to be wonderfully unnerving and yet somehow it completely misses the mark.
The film opens on emotionally unstable teenager, Tom (Anson Boom) and his cold, single mother Elaine (Charlie Murphy of Peaky Blinders), who have recently moved to rural Ireland, fleeing some unspecified trauma back in the UK. The two have taken up residence in the derelict home that once belonged to Elaine’s now recently deceased grandfather. The only people around are neighbours, Ward and Holly, an overprotective father and his teenage daughter, played respectively by Michael McElhatton (of Game of Thrones fame) and Emma Mackey (from Netflix’s Sex Education). From the off, there is something not quite right about the neighbours, but Elaine ingratiates herself with Ward anyway, leaving Tom to befriend the confident and worldly Holly, who smokes and says things like “you don’t talk much do you?”
Indeed, Tom is something of a melancholy character. He spends most of his time skulking round the lake at the back of the house, collecting animal skulls with a general sense of doom and gloom. On one fateful excursion, Tom uncovers a bag containing a horrific secret, which forces him to question how much he really knows about his mysterious neighbours. It is a shame that the bag’s devastating contents are revealed almost immediately as the human remains of a baby. With so few characters, it is no great mystery who the baby belongs to and the rest of the film unfolds with one predictable plot point after another. Director Phil Sheerin disperses any sense of suspense or intrigue by giving away the film’s central mystery within its first act and once the secret is out, there is very little by the way of substance to carry the plot to its resolution.
Cinematographer Ruairí O’Brien takes full advantage of the innately haunting setting with various lingering shots of the misty lake and marshy landscape. It is certainly atmospheric, but sadly no amount of wonderfully gloomy shots can lift Sheerin’s film from its astonishingly predictable plot. What should be a twisted psychological horror falls into the equally frightening but less desirable category of bland.
