Sarah (Kate Bosworth), Lou (Lake Bell), and Abby (Katie Aselton) are reunited for the first time in what seems to have been many years. Sarah plans for them to spend a weekend on an uninhabited island, to reconnect with one another. It turns out that the island isn't actually that uninhabited. Three men are on there, ex-military. One of them is known to the women, which allows them to relax and spend some time together, drinking under the night sky. But things soon take a turn for the worse.
Very much the creation of Aselton, who both co-wrote the screenplay with Mark Duplass and also decided to direct again (a couple of years after her feature directorial debut, The Freebie), Black Rock is a film that clearly has good intentions. It just falls some way short of the mark when it comes to delivering whatever it is aiming for. It remains interesting enough, if only to see this familiar material in a rare case of it not being filtered through the male gaze (also check out the superior Revenge for that), but it's a case of the approach to the whole thing being of more interest than any of the actual content, which will leave viewers wanting if they think they are getting a standard revenge thriller.
Everyone does just fine in the acting department. Bosworth, Bell, and Aselton have a decent amount of chemistry between them, with no small amount of tension between the latter two, stemming from an incident in their past that they may or may not move on from. Will Bouvier, Jay Paulson, and Anslem Richardson are the men, and do fine in their roles. Initially viewed with suspicion, they are soon shown to be normal guys who don't automatically pose any threat to the women, although their appearance immediately puts the women more on edge than they would have been if left to enjoy the alone time that was planned.
The biggest problem with Black Rock is that the second half doesn't work. At all. Everything is good for the first half, and the main incident that changes the whole tone of the film is very well done, but it then becomes a much less interesting film. The characters were being developed well for that first half, which is then dropped altogether (and before any of them are truly fully-formed) in favour of something ultimately unsatisfying for those who want a drama, yet also unsatisfying for those who want a thriller. It doesn't even do enough to subvert any tropes and expectations, and each subsequent scene in the second half gets worse and worse right up to the anti-climactic finale.
I can't really point out the many ways in which this could have been improved. Sometimes these things are intangible as you view the film as a sum of its parts, sometimes there is something obvious that sticks out. All I know is that Aselton seems to have missed an opportunity to deliver something interesting and unique.
The biggest problem with Black Rock is that the second half doesn't work. At all. Everything is good for the first half, and the main incident that changes the whole tone of the film is very well done, but it then becomes a much less interesting film. The characters were being developed well for that first half, which is then dropped altogether (and before any of them are truly fully-formed) in favour of something ultimately unsatisfying for those who want a drama, yet also unsatisfying for those who want a thriller. It doesn't even do enough to subvert any tropes and expectations, and each subsequent scene in the second half gets worse and worse right up to the anti-climactic finale.
I can't really point out the many ways in which this could have been improved. Sometimes these things are intangible as you view the film as a sum of its parts, sometimes there is something obvious that sticks out. All I know is that Aselton seems to have missed an opportunity to deliver something interesting and unique.
