BERKSHIRE COUNTY Rating: NNN See listing.
Where to watch: iTunes
After movies like Inside, The Strangers and You’re Next, the home-invasion thriller has a new lease on life – and why not? Minimal locations, a handful of characters, a clear survival narrative – a talented filmmaker can have a lot of fun with those ingredients on a modest budget, even if she doesn’t break new ground.
Audrey Cummings’s Berkshire County isn’t fun, exactly. Cummings and screenwriter Chris Gamble are less interested in laughs than in building unrelenting tension and disquiet in their tale of a teenager who discovers that babysitting on Halloween is a really terrible gig.
After an impulsive sex act is posted online, ostracized high-schooler Kylie (Alysa King) would rather just dig a hole and crawl into it, but instead, she’s watching a little boy at a big house in rural Ontario. She’s jumpy – and so are we – even before the child with the pig mask shows up at the door.
From there, Berkshire County launches into a series of escalating scares, most of which continue to make sense as the larger plot becomes clear. That plot isn’t especially original, but it’s employed in the service of a vicious and effective genre project, and the time spent on character development makes us genuinely care about Kylie’s survival. 83 minutes.
