Metacritic reviews

It’s a chilling, assured debut for writer/director Power, packed with promise and a startlingly mundane sort of violence which is all the more shocking for its realism.

It’s a really well-made genre movie, the product of a smart, obviously skilled filmmaker with a good sense of economy.

What Backcountry did for campfire creature attacks Killing Ground does for murderous bushmen in the same setting.

Killing Ground is an effective indie creeper that unnerves the audience with its all-too-realistic violence.

What the film doesn’t do, much to its credit, is make the killers into charismatically “cool” villains, à la Wolf Creek‘s Mick Taylor.

The film is a blunt, brutally effective survival tale distinguished by the parallel suspense tracks of its non-chronological structure.

Killing Ground comes down to what you want to experience in a horror movie. Granted, all this elaborately constructed savagery is upsetting, so the film succeeds on that level. But without suspense to propel it forward, and without a compelling backstory to deepen the intrigue, upset is all we’ve got.

Lean and relentless, patient and pitiless, “Killing Ground” is the sort of thriller that gives horror movies a good name.

Killing Ground isn't terrible. Far from it, in fact. It uses the non-linear narrative structure well to toy with the audience and create a sense of mystery around the duel arcs of the characters involved.

Killing Ground’s twists might be effective, but stylistically speaking, it’s sub-Eli Roth.