Retreat

If you are going to make a three-handed, one-location thriller that references Roman Polanski’s ‘Knife in the Water’ and Phillip Noyce’s ‘Dead Calm’, in which an insidious stranger drives a wedge between a married couple, you need more skill and imagination than writer-director Carl Tibbetts displays here. After a distressing miscarriage, journalist Kate (Thandie Newton) and her architect husband Martin (Cillian Murphy, pictured), return to the remote island of Blackholme, where they once spent an idyllic holiday, to try to save their disintegrating marriage. But a dodgy generator, a broken CB radio and the unexpected arrival of injured soldier Jack (Jamie Bell), who rants about a fatal airborne virus and a global pandemic, expose the couple’s vulnerabilities, pitting them against both the interloper and each other. Tibbetts’s laboured attempts to ratchet up the sexual and psychological tension are not helped by below-par performances from the three poorly served leads – or by an increasing suspicion that he is about to pull a barely credible final twist out of the bag, which he duly does.