The Lost Scot
2019 · 15m
Directed by Julien Cornwall
Genres: dark comedy, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tense
Three friends on a clay shooting trip in the Scottish Moorlands accidentally shoot the gamekeeper accompanying them and must work together to get out of the mess.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent thriller-comedy hybrid with a genuinely twisted premise — three guys, one dead gamekeeper, Scottish moors, the works — but it never quite commits hard enough to either the absurdism or the dread to feel truly subversive; it's genre-aware without being genre-defiant.
Cornwall demonstrates formal control in his cross-cutting between comic panic and moral weight, situating the film within a lineage of British dark comedies that traffic in class anxiety and rural violence — the editing rhythm is deliberate, the tonal shifts earned rather than accidental.
The film's entire engine is the decision to play the accident itself as almost mundane — no big reveal, no twist, just three ordinary men in shock — and that restraint, that refusal to milk the premise for spectacle, is what makes the mounting dread actually land.