Film / In Fear

"How much do you love your life?"

In Fear is a 2013 British horror film and the directorial debut of Jeremy Loverning. It stars Iain De Caestecker, Alice Englert, and Allen Leech.

It's your classic Boy Meets Girl scenario—Tom meets Lucy one lucky night at the bar, they hit it off, and she gives him her number. Two weeks later, he takes that next big step and invites her to join him and some friends for a music festival in Ireland...oh but don't worry, it's not a date or anything, he just wants to get to know her better, that's all. Along the way, the two stop by a nearby pub for some drinks and a bathroom break, where Tom has a not-so-great encounter with some rowdy locals.

Once they're back on the road, Tom reveals his big surprise for Lucy that night: he had booked them a night's stay at the rustic Kilairney House Hotel, where they can really get to know each other. Although initially hesitant, Lucy agrees, and the two follow their apparent guide up through the countryside until he mysteriously leaves them behind at a fork in the road. Oh well, maybe he was just leaving to pick someone else up! This is a very secluded hotel, after all, they'll be fine on their own, there are signs all around that they can follow! And...oh, the map says something different? The GPS stopped working? Oh, well, they should be fine just following the signs, and...how did they end up back here again? And again, and again, and again...

It doesn't take long for the new couple to realize they're lost; very, very lost. No matter which direction they take, they always end up driving in a circle, and as night falls, their situation becomes even stranger still. As their budding relationship is put to the test, the couple soon realizes that they're not alone in these dark woods...

Originally filmed in 2011, the film premiered at Sundance and is noteworthy for the use of improvisations over a written script for nearly all of its scenes.

Trailer 1. Trailer 2.

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In Fear contains examples of:

• Abandoned Area: Lucy, upon finally reaching the hotel, finds it completely desolate and the parking lot full of abandoned cars. For extra spookiness, it is played by the IRL abandoned and derelict Blackborough House in Devon, England that's currently undergoing a lengthy attempt at restoration.
• Affably Evil: Max acts like a chummy schoolboy, even as he directly menaces the couple.
• The Alcoholic: Tom is implied to have a drinking problem, and is shown downing a large bottle of liquor he has stashed in his front seat throughout the film as he becomes more unnerved.
• Alone with the Psycho: Although unaware of it at the time, Lucy becomes this when Tom steps outside following an outburst, leaving her alone with Max—who's soon revealed to be a serial killer, for a good few minutes.
• A Storm Is Coming: Storm clouds begin to roll in when the couple starts on their journey, and it rains throughout much of the final half of the film when the tension reaches a boiling point.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Max badgers Lucy with these when forcing her to make a Sadistic Choice: whether he should kill her or Tom that night, to further drive her into a corner.
  Max: How much do you love Tom?
  Lucy: FUCK YOU!
  Max: How much do you love your life?
• Armor-Piercing Response: When Max casually asks if Tom and Lucy are a couple, the latter immediately responds with a harsh "no". Even Max briefly looks taken aback by this. There's also her "choice" later on, which Tom is visibly distressed by even after it appears to all been just a ruse.
• Auto Erotica: A variant occurs early on, although outside of the car rather than inside as Tom and Lucy have a passionate make-out session on the hood of the car, although they're interrupted by some locals before they can go further.
• The Bad Guy Wins: While Lucy manages to escape, Max succeeds in killing Tom and breaking her.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: The couple is forced to drive through some butchered rabbits strung up through the trees in their path, planted there by a supposed hunter from the pub that Max claims to have bad blood with. It's implied that he was actually the one to plant them, and he forces Tom to remove them when they get caught on the windshield.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Played with. Lucy is noticeably disheveled and grimy and later receives a large cut on her head that leaves blood streaking down and staining her face, by the time the film ends. In comparison, Tom stays pretty well put together even after walking around in the rainy woods many times during the night and rolling in the mud for several minutes during a fight with Max, which—excluding the state of his clothes—leaves only a few specks of drying dirt left on his face. His corpse is relatively fresh and bloodless save for his bloodshot eyes and visible pallor.
• Berserk Button: Mentioning whatever happened in the pub is a surefire way to set Tom off. The killer intentionally presses this to rile him up once he figures this out.
• Big Bad: Max.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Max, a hitchhiker the couple hit with their car, appears to be another victim that has been tormented as well, and, although somewhat unreliable due to his injuries and a bit brash, chats up and briefly consoles Lucy after Tom has an aggressive outburst. He soon reveals that he is the man that has been stalking and tormenting them the entire night, and then immediately proceeds to threaten Lucy's life once she figures it out.
• Bound and Gagged: Tom is given a particularly gruesome example of this trope—he's gagged with the car's exhaust pipe. He eventually dies from carbon monoxide poisoning.
• Bolivian Army Ending: It's morning and Lucy has finally managed to escape the woods and reach the main road. Suddenly, Max steps out onto the road. They lock gazes and he opens his arms to her while smiling. She slams her foot on the pedal and accelerates towards him. He closes his eyes and...Smash to Black. Roll credits.
• Break the Cutie / Break the Haughty: Lucy and Tom respectively.
• Bring It: (makes a 'come hither' gesture) "Come on, Lucy."
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: A thoroughly pissed-off Tom decides to try and attack Max after the latter spent the whole evening psychologically torturing and threatening him and Lucy. After Max wipes the floor with him, he caps it off by snapping Tom's wrist like a twig. This injury incapacitates him for the rest of the film.
• The Cake Is a Lie: Or hotel, in this case.
• Camping a Crapper: Lucy is spied on while using the pub's toilet in the beginning, although nothing actually happens to her. Later on, Tom is almost attacked while taking a piss in the woods.
• Car Fu: Lucy uses this on Max at the end.
• The Cassandra: Lucy catches on quickly that something isn't right, but is brushed off by Tom even as things escalate such as her stolen clothes being strewn along their path and her seeing a creepy masked man skulking about. It's only when she is dragged off right in front of him that Tom finally believes her.
• Cat Scare: Tom spooks Lucy early on by dragging her out of the backseat while she's looking for a flashlight.
• Cathartic Scream: Lucy lets out a good few of these when she finds Tom dead in the trunk and later lets out a big one when charging at Max in the ending. Considering the night she's had, one can hardly blame her.
• Character Tics: Max, as part of his Affably Evil persona, tends to softly shush his victims before inflicting serious harm on them: he does so to Lucy while holding her down and later does it to Tom while slowly breaking his wrist.
• Chase Scene: Max chases Lucy during the climax in his Landrover.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Tom displays this behavior early on towards Lucy when he threatens to drive back to the pub and beat up the barman who had hit on her earlier.
• Corrupt the Cutie: Presumably one of Max's intentions in targeting Lucy is specifically to try and invoke this. He succeeds.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Tom is captured and bound in the trunk of his own car, with the exhaust pipe shoved down and taped around his throat. He's eventually killed from carbon monoxide poisoning following Lucy's confrontation with Max, and the result does not look pretty.
• Cue the Sun: The ending.
• Deadly Road Trip: The couple is on a road trip to go see a music festival in Ireland and decides to stay at a secluded hotel in the woods the night before it starts.
• Damsel in Distress: Lucy is briefly dragged into the woods by the masked man and is narrowly rescued by Tom, who manages to chase him off. She is later taken hostage by Max in the car to force Tom to comply with his demands.
• Danger Takes a Backseat: Max—the supposed "victim" that Tom and Lucy pick up later on—is revealed to be the killer that's been tormenting them the entire night while he's sitting in their backseat. He takes advantage of this to grab Lucy from behind and hold her hostage. This incident scars her so badly that when she makes it back to the car alone just before the climax, the first thing she does is check the backseat in case he’s hiding there.
• Death Seeker: It's implied that Max is this.
• Developing Doomed Characters: The movie solely follows Lucy and Tom for the majority of the running time. It isn't until around the 40-minute mark that we're introduced to a new character who's soon revealed to be the killer.
• Dies Wide Open: Tom.
• "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: Alice Englert (Lucy) performs a cover of "A Conversation With Death" over the credits.
• Don't Go in the Woods: The film takes place in the backwoods of Ireland.
• Drives Like Crazy: Max forces Tom to intentionally do this when he takes Lucy hostage by forcing him to drive at such a high velocity that he nearly crashes the car.
• Endearingly Dorky: Tom is quite awkward when trying to invite Lucy to the festival through voicemail, and seems to charm Lucy with his corny jokes at the beginning of the film.
• Enfante Terrible: Max mentions that one of the guys from the pub intentionally jumped out into the open road when he was a child while hiding in a ditch, just to see what happened, leading to the instant death of an unfortunate driver that swerved to avoid hitting him. Considering that it's implied that this kid was actually Max himself, and the revelation of him having several previous victims before the couple, it's all but stated that this incident was his Start of Darkness.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Sans the final scene, the film takes place almost entirely over the span of a single night.
• Face Death with Dignity: While he seems nervous at first, Max opens his arms, closes his eyes, and smiles serenely as Lucy speeds toward him with the intent to kill.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: Max.
• Fighting Irish: Tom gets into an altercation offscreen with some locals while Lucy was in the bathroom after he spilled one of their drinks, and they, later on, appear to show rowdy, aggressive behavior towards them. Max is also a local from the area who's secretly an adrenaline junkie serial killer and is clearly having the time of his life when he's beating the ever-loving snot out of Tom and chasing Lucy.
• Final Girl: Lucy manages to survive the night and escape while outliving her boyfriend, although her fate is ultimately left ambiguous.
• Flipping the Bird: Tom does this to the guy driving the land rover who was supposed to lead them to the hotel, only to promptly steer off course and leave them behind at the gate. Lucy berates him for being rude. The driver is later on revealed to be Max.
• Go Out with a Smile: Max, possibly.
• Going in Circles: What should be a straightforward route to a remote hotel becomes a nightmare when the couple ends up circling back to the exact same place they started, regardless of which direction they take. Not helping is all the contradictory signs and maps that only seem to get them more lost. As it turns out, this whole setup was a deliberate trap created by an adrenaline junkie serial killer that has already made them his prey.
• Hell Hotel: The couple's main destination is a remote hotel, located deep in the Irish woods, that cannot be found on GPS and has signs all around the forest, as well as multiple maps, that blatantly contradict each other. It turns out that it doesn't actually exist and was all a ruse step up by Max to attract victims.
• He's Not My Boyfriend: Lucy says this about Tom when Max asks her if they're together.
• Hollywood Darkness: Averted.
• Hostile Hitchhiker: Following a harrowing encounter with their stalker, the couple is frantically driving down the road while panicking and accidentally hit a man standing in the middle of the road. He proceeds to crawl into their car, but doesn't seem malicious—and claims to have been attacked himself by the same guy. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, they allow him to tag along as they try to find the main road, and he appears to try and help them out at first by giving them directions. As it turns out, he cut his own face and intentionally allowed himself to be hit, and is revealed to not only be the guy who's been tormenting them the entire night but is later revealed to be a serial killer that is behind everything, including the hotel, and has presumably had several other victims in the past.
• Impending Doom P.O.V.: Shows up a few times early on, such as when Lucy's on the phone with the hotel, and following Tom and Lucy's argument just before the latter is attacked.
• Improvised Weapon User: Tom tries attacking Max with a broken liquor bottle.
• I Lied: Max grabs Lucy from the backseat and claims to be holding a knife to the back of her head, threatening to kill her unless Tom starts driving ridiculously fast. He continues to torment Lucy with this same knife when Tom is able to stop the car, threatening to kill her unless she chooses whether she or Tom should die that night. It's only when she finally makes her choice in her blind panic that he laughs and lets her go, revealing that he fibbed the entire thing and that he didn't even have a knife on him. This ends up being the last straw for Tom, who follows him outside and tries to beat him into the mud while Lucy's left crying in shock in the car over what just happened.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: As Tom starts to get freaked out himself, he begins drinking some liquor he has stashed in the car and even offers Lucy some, which she turns down. She accepts the bottle the second time.
• Insecure Love Interest: Tom has shades of this.
• I Surrender, Suckers: Max appears to throw in the towel during his and Tom's tussle, handing him his discarded broken bottle to "finish this." Tom takes the bait and Max breaks his wrist.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Tom is obnoxiously stubborn, somewhat of a shallow horndog, has a bad Hair-Trigger Temper, and is dismissive of Lucy's justifiable concerns early on, but he's still ultimately an awkward, insecure guy that jumps into action to rescue her after she's dragged out of the car, attempts to comfort her by easing the tension with some lighthearted jokes when he sees her visibly upset after their fight and tries to flat out kill Max in her defense after he psychologically tortures her to the point of tears. Not that it saves him.
• Large Ham: Allen Leech as Max, and then some.
• Like an Old Married Couple: Played with regarding Tom and Lucy. While their banter is awkwardly playful early on, it quickly becomes apparent that they aren't the healthiest match for each other as the night goes on and their situation becomes much more stressful. Despite this, they clearly do care for each other and Lucy is devastated when she finds him dead.
• Little Dead Riding Hood: Lucy wears a red sweater and scarf throughout the film and she and her boyfriend become prey to a stalker and serial killer out in the woods whose primary tactic is deception. In a twist on this trope, she's the Final Girl; the boyfriend, however, isn't so lucky.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Max has a relatively deep and bloody cut on his face and was also hit by a speeding car, but these injuries only seem to act up when convenient for him. He's later shown to still be able to move around effortlessly, holds himself in a fight with the (at the time) uninjured Tom, and keeps up with the couple long into the night. He also barely reacts outside of stumbling when Tom slams a glass liquor bottle into the back of his head during their tussle and laughs it off.
• Malevolent Masked Men / White Mask of Doom: The killer has one, although he ditches it when pretending to be a victim. He's later seen donning it when grabbing Tom before the climax.
• Masochism Tango: Tom jokes that they've already started the foreplay after Lucy playfully punches his shoulder in the beginning.
• The Maze: What should be a straightforward drive to a remote hotel turns out to be this as the couple literally drive in circles regardless of where they turn, and encounter a variety of new obstacles including a tree nearly crushing them, Lucy's clothes strewn out along the trees and path, and a masked man who stalks and regularly attacks them who is revealed to have intentionally designed this layout to trap his victims.

Lucy: "We're not lost. We're in a fucking maze."

• Men Are the Expendable Gender: The film's leads are a guy and a girl. Guess which of the two is still alive by the end?
• Moment Killer: Tom and Lucy share a romantic kiss at the beginning before they're rudely interrupted by the guys Tom had pissed off at the pub honking at them while making lewd gestures and mooning them. The masked man later makes his presence explicitly known to the couple when he abducts Lucy right in the middle of them having a somewhat relaxed bonding moment following their argument. Later on, Max deliberately reveals himself when he notices Lucy trying to quietly comfort a visibly distressed Tom by holding his hand in the car.
• Mud Wrestling: A decidedly unsexy Rare Male Example occurs as Tom and Max's tussle in the fresh mud very quickly turns into an attempted No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
• My Car Hates Me: While generally averted, due to the movie almost taking place entirely in a car, their GPS conveniently stops working right as they start driving to the hotel, which forces them to rely on the contradictory road signs and map directions and leads to them getting lost in the first place. Later, they run the risk of running out of petrol, which they do right as Max starts actively pursuing them in his landrover, forcing them to try and flee into the woods on foot.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Both Tom and Lucy experience this after their first major in-person run-in with Max; the former for allowing his anger to take over and attempting to attack him with the intent to kill, and the latter for choosing Tom to die instead of herself per Max's Sadistic Choice in a moment of panic.
• Never My Fault: Tom's Fatal Flaw, along with his temper.
• Noodle Incident: Whatever happened in the pub. We don't get to actually see it, but Tom claims that a guy there spilled his drink on him, and in return, he bought him and his buddies drinks in a gesture of goodwill. According to Max, however, the incident went down quite differently.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Tom tries to inflict this on Max when the latter starts to walk away after tormenting them for lord knows how long. It doesn't end well for him.
• No Sense of Personal Space: Max is especially fond of invading Lucy's space: pressuring her into getting uncomfortably close to him while fetching him a water bottle, and he later completely abuses this while holding her down later on in the car—grabbing her shoulder, roughly grabbing her face and stroking her hair while leaning in close from behind.
• Nothing Is Scarier: It takes quite a while for things to go from zero to 100, and the first half of the movie instead chooses to focus on the primal fear of the couple gradually getting more and more lost, with a heavy emphasis on the claustrophobia of being stuck in a car for long periods of a time with a person you barely know, the spooky atmosphere of the woods at night, the Mind Screw and gradual paranoia of the characters as they continue to drive in circles.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Max is a master at these, thanks to effective camouflage.
• Oh, Crap!: Tom and especially Lucy when they realize who exactly is in the car with them.
• Paranoia Gambit: Outside of the misleading signs, most of the fear the couple (and Lucy especially) experiences throughout the first half of the film is rooted in their paranoia that someone or something might be out there as they get more and more lost. As it turns out, yes, there is someone out there following them, and he finally makes his presence known around the thirty-minute mark.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: "If a man hurts an innocent person, that evil will fall back upon him and the fool will be destroyed." Lucy's response to seeing this scrawled on the pub's restroom wall is a blunt "or not." It was actually written by Max and he's shown to follow this ideology as he regularly antagonizes the considerably more dickish Tom throughout the rest of the night following a fight he started with some locals, and expresses Death Seeker tendencies that imply that he believes he deserves a Karmic Death himself.

Max: "Violence is the mother and the daughter.

• Properly Paranoid: Lucy catches on very early that something is off, although Tom dismisses her. She turns out to be very right.
• Psychotic Manchild: Despite being presumably in his late twenties, Max behaves in a manner far more befitting a rowdy teenager—including pulling very cruel "pranks" on his victims and treating his interactions with Tom and Lucy like a game. His fascination with exploiting people's fears is also rooted in the inherently childish curiosity of "seeing what would happen."
• Punk in the Trunk: Tom is grabbed while the couple is running in the woods and ends up separated, with Lucy discovering him stuffed in the boot following after narrowly escaping Max. Unfortunately for her, by the time she discovers this, it's long since become a Dead Man's Chest.
• Raven Hair, Ivory Skin: Lucy.
• Red Herring: The locals Tom pissed off at the pub at the beginning, as well as the unseen barman that hit on Lucy before she entered the bathroom. Max runs with the assumption of the former solely to taunt Tom later on before eventually revealing himself as the true culprit.
• Sacrificial Lion: Tom
• Sadistic Choice: Max forces Lucy to choose whether he should kill her or Tom while holding her hostage with a supposed knife to her skull. In her panic, she chooses Tom. He honors this request in an exceptionally cruel way.
• Say My Name: Lucy is reduced to screaming Tom's name after Max breaks his wrist and leaves him battered on the ground, whimpering in pain for several minutes and later when she discovers him dead in the trunk.
• Scary Scarecrows: While driving in the dark, Lucy sees the masked man watching them on the side of the road and freaks out. When Tom drives back to check, all that's left behind in that spot is a spooky-looking scarecrow. He assumes that's simply what she saw and chastises her.
• Scenery Gorn: The "hotel."
• Scenery Porn: The film contains some absolutely beautiful shots of the English (standing in for Ireland) countryside, especially at the beginning when the couple starts driving to their destination.
• Screaming Woman: Lucy becomes this a few times, although not to a gratuitous degree.
• Self-Harm: Max intentionally picks at his head wound when the couple isn't looking to cause it to bleed more.
• Serial Killer: Judging by the mountain of destroyed cars scattered throughout the "hotel's" parking lot, it's heavily implied that Max has been luring people out into the woods and killing them for a long, long time.
• Sex Signals Death: The implications behind Tom booking a hotel are made crystal clear, and he's the more openly horny of the pair. He dies while the more reserved Lucy survives.
• Slut-Shaming: During a particularly bad case of Never My Fault, Tom deflects Lucy asking him about the pub incident by implying that she led on the barman that hit on her earlier and that he's the one that had been messing with them because she didn't fully put out. This causes her to leave the car in anger and she lingers outside while fetching a coat to cry, unaware that she's being watched the entire time.
• Stalker Shot: Max peeps on an oblivious Lucy through a glory hole at the beginning of the film.
• Stalker without a Crush: Max. It's implied that he had been following the couple even long before the film actually begins. Some of his behavior around Lucy implies that this could also be a "with a crush" scenario as well.
• The Sociopath: Max puts up a front of superficial charm and charisma in order to take advantage of his victim's sense of security, can fake emotions depending on the situation at the drop of a hat, and pulls cruel "pranks" that include forcing Lucy to choose whether she or Tom should live and forcing Tom to drive at such a high velocity that they almost crash, and displays such a Lack of Empathy that his biggest concern when chasing Lucy is not hitting the trunk so she won't discover Tom before he expires.
• Stuffed in the Fridge: A rare male example occurs with Tom's dead body being stuffed in the boot of the car for Lucy to find. This proves to be the straw that breaks the camel's back and ultimately pushes her to try and flat-out kill Max in the end.
• Tagline: "Don't fear the dark. Fear what it hides."
• Teach Him Anger: It's implied that Max specifically targets Lucy to invoke this and get her down to his level by embracing Pay Evil unto Evil. Judging by the ending, he likely succeeds.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: The killer, once his identity is revealed, is a normal, relatively good-looking man in his late twenties.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Lucy in the final scene. Once she sees Max and snaps out of her shock, it turns into a full-on Death Glare.
• Too Dumb to Live: Tom makes some exceptionally boneheaded decisions throughout the film, including refusing to listen to Lucy's concerns about the masked man she keeps seeing; leaving his defenseless girlfriend by herself for several minutes while he scopes out the area, alone, without any kind of weapon, and ends up temporarily losing the car keys; driving back to confront the masked man Lucy was freaked out by—and keeping his ass parked there for several minutes, leading to them getting directly attacked moments later; and later flat out attempting to beat up a clearly violent and unstable man who proceeds to wipe the floor with him and wounds him, and allowing himself and Lucy to get separated while stumbling around in dark as they're being actively pursued by said madman. These mistakes eventually catch up to him fatally.
  • Lucy also makes a crucial error in immediately trusting the word of the strange bleeding man who mysteriously showed up on the side of the road and literally crawled into their car, who later on turns out to be a violent, sociopathic serial killer.
• Twice Shy: Tom and Lucy at the beginning of the film are clearly attracted to each other, but their interactions are noticeably awkward due to them only knowing each other for two weeks, at most. Tom, attempting to be more forward in his romantic advances (and possibly more), unwittingly kickstarts their very long, not romantic, night.
• Uptight Loves Wild: Shy and intelligent Lucy hooks up with the impulsive and temperamental Tom. Subverted in that they don't really know each other that well, and it quickly becomes apparent throughout the night that they're not a great match.
• Uncertain Doom: Lucy and Max.
• Violent Glaswegian: Tom, played by Scottish actor Iain De Caestecker, has a very prevalent Hair-Trigger Temper and has a drinking problem.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: The killer wounds and allows himself to be clipped in the side by the couple (who are still understandably rattled after their last encounter with him just mere moments earlier) to pass himself off as a fellow victim and lure them into a false sense of security while giving them misleading directions.
• Wham Shot: Quite a few occur throughout the film, but arguably the biggest examples include the "In Case of Fire" map mysteriously appearing in the glove box after Tom threw it out the window hours ago, the masked man appearing behind an oblivious Tom, Lucy finally reaching the hotel ...only to find it decrepit and abandoned, and littered with hundreds of wrecked, abandoned cars presumably belonging to Max's previous victims, and lastly, Tom's dead body in the trunk.
• Wham Line: "Did you cut your own face, Max?"
  • There’s also the moment when Lucy finally reaches the hotel and finds a literal car graveyard instead:

Max: "I know what you're thinking: 'it looked a LOT better on the website!' That took me AGES! You know how long it took for me to find a place like this? Breakfast is served half 6:00 to 10:00! If you need a hand with your bags, you’re going to half to wait! As you can see, I am snowed under! Okay, I’ll admit the rooms are a little drafty! See you in the morning, Luce! Picture postcard Ireland!"

• X Meets Y: The Strangers meets The Hitcher.

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