Skip to main content

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.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Djjj4G

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs