‘Death Among the Pines’ Review
Stars: Nathan Shepka, Nicolette McKeown, Stephen Kerr, Olly Bassi, Nico Palmieri, David McCallum, Gary Collinson | Written by Nathan Shepka, Tom Jolliffe | Directed by Nathan Shepka
The sixth film from writer/director/producer/actor Nathan Shepka, who does indeed take up all those roles for Death Among the Pines. I haven’t yet seen any of his other directed movies, but I have been meaning to catch Holiday Monday as part of my many Christmas movie viewings. Apart from The Baby in the Basket, each of his movies seems to be in the action/thriller genre, and Death Among the Pines is no different.
Angela gets a knock at her door late one stormy night. The same night, a man is on the escape from the police. But things aren’t quite how they seem.
It doesn’t take long for the viewer to work out that this isn’t going to be your usual man on the run from the police story. The opening scene does pull you in with obvious and deliberate stereotypes and cliches, but it almost immediately starts hinting that this isn’t how the story goes. You’ll be immediately suspicious of Angela, and we know something isn’t right about her visitor, but we spend the next eight minutes discovering exactly what it is.
For a film that is promoted as an action thriller, the pace is quite slow, but I wouldn’t say it ever gets too boring. At well under an hour and a half, it would be hard pushed to make it that way. But we do get lots of scenes of Angela and her visitor just chatting, occasionally with one extra character as well. These dialogue-heavy scenes are here for a reason; they continue the story as you discover more about the characters and their past, but if I’m honest, it’s never that engrossing.
The action scenes are where you’d think things would start to get exciting. And there is at least four one-on-one fight scenes, if that’s your thing, but this isn’t The Raid. Maybe that’s unfair because it’s a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to the physical conflict. Plenty of it looks absolutely fine. Punches are thrown, bodies go flying, and blood is spilt, but all too often we’ll also see some not-so-great punches, some weak-looking weapon swings and some half-arsed choke holds. If you’d just come for the action scenes, you’re going to leave disappointed.
The performances are okay. There’s clearly plenty of experience and talent among the three leads of Nicolette McKeown, Stephen Kerr and the aforementioned Shepka. But sometimes the script is lacking, and the characters often make some silly, bordering on unrealistic decisions. The twists and turns are never really shocking and you’ll see most of them coming a mile off, which doesn’t spoil the movie but after the initial attempt at fooling the audience, all feels a little lacklustre.
I was also never really sure who I was rooting for. Everyone is basically a murderer or someone who wants to murder someone else for very little reason. The characters aren’t completely unlikable, but their actions make them hard to root for. The filmmakers just about fill the eighty-minute runtime, but that does include a quite lengthy sex scene, which at least did serve a purpose. I did enjoy the rainy backdrop to the action and would have liked to have seen that used more.
But the reality is that Death Among the Pines has action that isn’t exciting enough and too slow a pace for the kind of thriller it seems to set out to be. The effort from the actors doesn’t go unnoticed, and the storyline isn’t a bad one, but the execution just isn’t there.
Death Among the Pines is set for a UK-wide release in the Autumn, courtesy of High Fliers.
