In Fear is a low budget horror movie set in Ireland. A newly dating couple are supposed to be on their way to a festival, but he has booked them into a hotel as a surprise. Despite being equipped with a satnav and maps, they are unable to find the hotel and begin to suspect something is wrong...
The setting of almost the entire film in the car works to its advantage and the film manages to create a fair amount of tension in the first half. Once the film starts to reveal what's going on it starts to go fall apart. It seems a clear case of a writer having a good premise for a movie and beginning it strongly, but not knowing where to take the idea.
In a trait that is unfortunately more common for horror movies than any other genre, the characters begin to act in completely unrealistic ways to set up scares and some of the events in the movie are entire unrealistic and unexplained, and this serves to reduce the tension. If horror writers would realise that far more tension is created when we believe the characters are acting realistically and that the events taking place in the movie make sense, we'd have been spared a heck of a lot of bad cinema over the past couple of decades! This is not one of the worst horrors in recent years by any stretch, it was well directed, well acted, and with a script that didn't run out of ideas halfway through could have been a strong movie. The good first half, short length of the movie, and excellent use of rural Ireland as a setting push the movie into the 'worth watching' category, if you are OK with low budget horror and all of the clichés and issues that accompany the genre.
