Seriously bloody horrible in every particular, and uncompromisingly bleak to the very end, this looks to me like the best British horror film in years: nasty, scary and tight as a drum.

As a thriller, Eden Lake absolutely works, but feel-good entertainment it isn’t. Don’t bring a date.

The shattering downbeat ending is well earned and genuinely shocking.

You don't watch it, you survive it. A battering experience, and the hardest Brit horror in years.

Eden Lake doesn't feel like torture porn so much as a rural-jeopardy thriller in extremis.

This slice of class-baiting British ordeal horror from writer-director James Watkins is potently made. It's also exploitative trash, serving up silly levels of alarmist editorialising about kids today.

Eden Lake has the trappings of a low-IQ thriller but it's really a contemptible tract feeding the prejudices of the U.K.'s rightwing tabloids that claim the country is overrun by teenagers wielding knives.