A young couple go for a picnic beside a lake in the grounds of an empty house. Three years before, the owner had murdered all his family, killed his animals and disappeared.<br />It's a simple premise of a couple going to a lake for a picnic at a farm where the owner murdered his family and animals and then disappeared. But as they while away the hours, they soon realise that something far more sinister is happening. Vickers's constant use of a creeping camera prowling through the woods is proto-Evil Dead, especially with the jangly synth score, but it's far less manic, more elegantly evil. He has a masterful understanding of tone and the building of tension through silence and visual cues, including an ending that makes your eyebrows raise for the sheer number of implications it raises. The Lake feels quite similar in set-up to one of the Ghost Stories for Christmas in its measured tone and rural English setting (indeed, it's possibly set in my home county of Northamptonshire), though it differs through its addition of a sexual relationship between a couple at the centre of the narrative, instead of the very single, very solitary heroes of those films.