The story can be summed up fairly easily - a bunch of ordinary folk are trapped in a supermarket by – guess what? – a mist containing malevolent wibbly-wobbly things. Holed up together with a faceless, alien enemy outside pretty soon the people are factionalising and turning on one another, with less than hilarious concequences.

This is a properly horrific horror movie. Brutal and unrelentingly tense, it’s got the claustrophobic, fear-of-the-dark paranoia of Alien combined with the ghost-train BOO! shocks of Aliens. Like the best films of its genre it’s got something to say but the allegory of the survivors as a microcosm of society when faced with a threat they don’t understand only adds a layer to the story, it never overpowers it. It’s beautifully shot (the image of the mist as it first rolls down off the mountains is absolutely breathtaking, f’rinstance) and features universally rock-solid performances with Thomas Jane, Toby Jones and Marcia Gay Harden (as a terrifying wild-eyed fundamentalist) standing out.

The Mist isn’t the most fun I had with a film last year (that’d be Iron Man obv), or the best-acted film of last year (step forward, No Country For Old Men) and I’m not even sure I could even hand-on-heart recommend that you seek it out. But at the end of it (and BLIMEY, what an ending) my wife turned to me and said “I feel like I’ve just been fed through a cheese grater”. I’d probably have gone with “run through a mangle”, personally – my chest muscles were physically aching from being subconsciously tensed through most of the last two hours. With so much of the entertainment we’re fed being so much superficial dreck whose only purpose is to be something your eyes are pointed at for its running-length it seems wrong not to celebrate a film that dares to provoke a reaction, even if that reaction is shell-shock. Crikey, I was forced to watch two episodes of bleedin’ Hustle straight after viewing, because I desperately needed to take refuge in something that wouldn’t make me think, worry or emotionally engage with what I was seeing in any way whatsoever.

So yeah. The Mist - it’ll make you happy to see Marc sodding Warren and his stupid Mockney chipmunk face. There’s a box-quote for you.