Rabies (2010)

A young woman is trapped in a sealed pit, deep in the woods.  Her brother Ofer, unable to get her out, promises to find help.

A park ranger and his wife are conducting rounds of a nature reserve in a forest.

Four teenagers driving to a tennis tournament take a wrong turn and accidentally run over a man who staggers out of the woods in front of their car.

These three groups, as well as two others I haven't yet mentioned, will spend the rest of the film intersecting and interacting in various, rarely-productive, ways.

So .. this film.  Thirty minutes in, I was really enjoying it.  Decent interactions between the characters and a nice surprise in that the teenagers respond relatively sensibly to hitting the young man (who is Ofer, in case you hadn't realised).  Two of them stay with the car and call the cops - who wonder of wonders in a horror film, actually show up! - while the other two try to help Ofer find his sister.  I was excited.

And then the rapiness kicked in.  Oh boy.  Both the teens who stayed with the car are attractive young women, and one of the two cops is all about sexually assaulting them via a "search".  It's clearly not the first time, and it's also apparent that his partner - who we're disturbingly asked to find sympathetic - is aware of this and has covered for him in the past.  From then on in, I was frankly not in a positive mood toward the movie.  I could possibly have overlooked it if the second cop had been positioned as just as bad, given he is obviously complicit in the behaviour, but as noted, he's positioned as sympathetic.  Screw that.

Rabies (or Kalavet, in the original Hebrew) has a good cast (albeit working in a language I don't speak), and several good moments, but for my tastes they aren't enough to compensate for the awfulness of the gender politics.