Body at Brighton Rock

A day in the woods should colloquially equate to a walk in the park, but Wendy (Karina Fontes), a summer employee of the Brighton Rock State Park, winds up living out the worst-case scenario of even a seasoned woodsman. With breathtaking speed, as she gambols about the forest posting informative fliers for hikers, grooving to music on her phone, generally being carefree, she finds herself lost with only a random corpse for company. Nighttime fast approaches. She has to make do with what meager resources and tools she has, sitting tight until morning for emergency services and park rangers to track her down.
Roxanne Benjamin’s Body at Brighton Rock fits nicely alongside other horror films that turn nature into a paranoiac house of mirrors: Backcountry, The Blair Witch Project, Willow Creek, Evil Dead, Killing Ground, Grizzly Park. Her movie also shares common ancestry with straight-up survival movies, where characters find themselves at odds with the elements, doing whatever it takes or else be taken by them. In Wendy’s case, she’s got bupkis, but that’s a big part of what makes Body at Brighton Rock work: Most of us got bupkis. Relating to Wendy, and to her terror, is easy, and immediate, and lets the movie hook its claws into the viewer with jolting urgency.
Facilitating that urgency is Benjamin’s no-frills setup. Working with limited resources breeds creative ingenuity; this is as true for Benjamin as it is for Wendy. All that Benjamin needs to get her audience going is a scenic overlook of a beautiful park, a person willing to play a stiff for less than the total of the film’s 80-minute duration and an actress capable of carrying the full total of that duration with little dialogue to help her shoulder the burden. (Also, she needs a big damn bear.) Likewise, Wendy’s got next to zero tools at hand to shelter her from the elements, sustain her through the night and protect her from whatever dangers weave between the trees, whether they’re real or just conjured by human imagination. (Also, she needs a big damn can of bear repellent.)