Calibre

Two guys go hunting in the English woods. There's an accident, people end up dead, and one of the two convinces the other to cover it up, rather than just confess. So they try to maintain their cool until they can get out of the area, as circumstances keep delaying their departure and some of the locals get increasingly hostile for other reasons.

You know while watching it there's no chance they'll keep up the facade long enough to get clear. There are just too many things cropping up to keep them around, or increase the tension. What isn't clear is exactly how it'll happen. Will the one with a guilty conscience break down and confess? Will one of them make a slip of the tongue, or just fail to hide evidence? There's some effective tension there.

Once things are out in the open, it's uncertain how things will end. It isn't just a matter of who is going to die or how, you know someone's getting it in the neck. Even among the locals, there are competing interests at work, passions are running high, the moderate influences are struggling to keep the extremists under wraps.

So there's enough mystery about the specifics to maintain the tension you need to carry the film through to the end, even if I didn't care a whole lot about most of the characters, and can't remember hardly any of their names.