Into the Mine
Critic:
Chris Buick
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Posted on:
Oct 28, 2023
Directed by:
Sam Beamish
Written by:
Sam Beamish
Starring:
Jordan Scrase, Isaac Thompson, Bridie Simons
On the run after making off with twenty-five thousand pounds in an armed robbery, two criminals decide to hole themselves up in an abandoned mine and wait out the police, but soon discover that the mine has dark secrets of its own.
Lo-fi but high-octane, Into the Mine is very much a film of two halves. It all starts promisingly enough, straight in we meet Jack (Scrase) and Ed (Thompson) as they are forced to abandon their car and high foot it into the hills as they make their escape, a simple but effective enough introduction aptly executed to get one invested and raring to see where this all goes.
And where Into the Mine goes is to a place full of interesting ideas but suffers from trying to make too many ideas work at once, and in the end none of them are executed fully to the potential they promise. Once in the mine, the interactions between Jack and Ed allude to a potential dramatic thriller as the two tenuous partners beginning to turn on one another, a tried and true concept that always whets the appetite. It’s also here that the performances are at their strongest between the pair, Scrase perhaps giving a bit more than Thompson but still an interesting dynamic starts to appear as the film begins to lead us down an interesting path.
However, it’s at this point that the film then also tries to add in its supernatural horror element, and from that point on the film is somewhat torn apart by itself a little by trying to give both of those two potential narratives enough runway to really take off, but without the necessary focus, time or space for either to do so. There is gold to be struck with both of these ideas for sure, and over a longer runtime both could have even come together to create something really special. But with only fourteen minutes to play with, the film might have benefited from planting both feet firmly in one idea or the other.
Very lo-fi in terms of its presentation, relying a lot on grainy, dark shots and low lighting to create its unsettling vibe but is actually quite enjoyable, giving the film this brilliant aesthetic that amplifies the claustrophobic and ominous nature of the mine setting, not to mention being a lovely homage to the low budget horror/thrillers of before. Sound issues are distracting however, often at different levels and often also out of sync. It’s not quite as slick as it wants to be but generally, the filmmaking choices here are mostly pointing in the same direction to give the film the look and feel it needs to work.
It’s rough with a bit too much going on, but Into the Mine has promise and some great ideas and moments that showcase Beamish as a promising filmmaker with time.