Straightheads – 2006 | 80 mins | Thriller | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Shallow revenge thriller in the style of Straw Dogs from a half-baked underwritten script by writer/director Dan Reed. Reed clearly believes his superficial film has something to say about violence and the darker side of human behaviour. Former X-Files actress Gillian Anderson is drafted in to add some weight to the acting but her icy character is staggeringly one-dimensional and shares no closeness or chemistry with her screen partner. The moronic Danny Dyer is even worse and does his usual Cockney ‘geezer’ performance, but it’s bad acting that unites them both not shared trauma.

Businesswoman Alice (Anderson) and wi-fi security engineer Adam (Dyer) are a superficial middle-class couple from London returning home from an exhilarating night of partying and one-night-stand debauchery in a lavish country house. On their way home down a wooded and desolate country road,they struggle to overtake a Land Rover and Adam shouts abuse as they pass.Shortly down the road they collide with a deer crossing the road and are forced to stop, but the fateful collision catapults them into a brutal and unprovoked attack from the faceless occupants of the Land Rover.

Both are left emotionally and physically scarred by the savage attack; Alice was raped and Adam is left facially scarred. The police aren’t interested in the case, but when Alice’s father passes away, she visits his vacant home – which is in the vicinity of the rape scene. Alice sees one of her attackers riding a horse, follows him home, and together with Adam begins to plotting revenge.