Sam Carroll

There is much about this film that is unpolished and absent depth. However, I found the enduring irritant also proved to be the films most innovative attraction: and that is that the principal characters, the couple, are not pleasant people and this of itself is rather original as the film refuses to grant this couple and redeeming qualities and, moreover, one dislikes them from the whimpering attempt to message his proposal to the leap to the acerbic voice of the wife complaining about the imbalance in domestic duties; from the woman foolishly scratching the 4x4, to the husband's rapid degeneration in the face of adversity. I found it clever that the inability to like this couple led one to, at times, ask whether the actors were simply blowing it; they were not and, as one late in the movie discovers, these are despicable, morally abhorrent individuals. The other clever device was to lure the viewer in to assuming this was yet another American cliched plot where bad folk from the backwoods are pursuing young innocents lost in the remote mountains, whereas the two males that they encountered at the filling station were not the antagonists behind the pursuit.