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Make Up review – wintry chills in a spooky seaside thriller | Peter Bradshaw's film of the week

A teenager encounters ghostly goings-on and sexual intrigue at an out-of-season caravan park in a stylish psychological drama

The out-of-season holiday resort, like the abandoned city or ruined temple, has something fascinating and even erotic in its emptiness. Writer-director Claire Oakley taps into this mood for her debut feature, a psychological drama-thriller set in a wintry caravan park in St Ives, Cornwall. She has taken the template of arthouse Brit realism and audaciously spiked it with some genre thrills, as if Ken Loach collaborated with Brian De Palma or Nicolas Roeg. With cinematographer Nick Cooke, Oakley finds the bracingly different aspects of the Cornish landscape: ominous in the darkness, wild in the sunshine and menacing in the cold, as distant sea spray mixes with the cloud cover.

Molly Windsor (whom I last saw 10 years ago as a child actor in Samantha Morton’s The Unloved) plays Ruth, a teenager who shows up after dark at what looks like an utterly deserted caravan site: it is winter, of course, so it could be just after supper or four in the morning. There is something unwelcoming about it, but Ruth is at least expected: she is the girlfriend of Tom (Joseph Quinn) who works at the resort, and she’s hoping to get cleaning work there herself.

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