A teenager encounters ghostly occasions and sexual intrigue in a low-season mobile home park in a sublime mental drama.
The low-season vacation spot, such as the deserted city or the ruined temple, has something desirable and even erotic in its void. Writer-director Claire Oakley draws on this setting for her first feature film, a mental mystery drama set in a winter mobile home park in St Ives, Cornwall. He took the style of British realism of art and rehearsal and boldly enriched him with genre sensations, as if Ken Loach had collaborated with Brian De Palma or Nicolas Roeg. With cinematographer Nick Cooke, Oakley discovers other facets of the Cornish landscape: unsettling in the dark, wild in the sun and menacing in the cold, while remote sprays combine with cloud cover.
Molly Windsor (who I last saw 10 years ago when she was a child actor in Samantha Morton’s The Unloved) plays Ruth, a teenager who appears after dark in what looks like an absolutely abandoned caravan spot: it’s winter, of course, so she can be right after dinner or 4 a.m. There’s something unconsyficient about it, but at least Ruth is expected to: she’s Tom’s friend (Joseph Quinn) who paints on the station, and hopes to paint there herself.
Manager Shirley (Lisa Palfrey) takes it and allows Ruth and Tom to stay in one of the static caravans, with plenty of lascifiing laughter about how the last couple who occupied her ended up having a baby. Ruth is quite satisfied, Kai (Theo Barklem-Biggs), the other guy who works there in the care of the watchdog, is an unpleasant job. The only friendly face is Jade (Stefanie Martini), whose hobby is makeup and hairstyle and who proposes to redesign Ruth.
Ruth is annoyed to see locks of bright red hair on the bed she keeps with Tom, and the faint remnants of a kiss from Cupid’s bow in the mirror. Is Tom having an affair? But then, why can you see that same form of kisses mysteriously appear at dusk in the windows of supposedly empty caravans – caravans that have been hygienically sealed in polyurethane containers for winter – like a ghostly ectoplasma? Is this position haunted? Or does Ruth herself revel in a spectral and psychosexual premonition of something in her own future?
The concept of a ghost in a beach hotel is appropriate and yet a tautology. The total position at this time of year is a ghost, a strange spectre of his summer self. Oakley shows how without the sun or Christmas poisoning, you can more obviously see the textures and everyday surfaces, but they are equally sensual. One of her most productive sequences is Ruth’s A Bad Dream, which is nothing more than a static photo of a marram grass on the beach, which in five or 10 seconds goes from green to reddish brown, as if she were poisoned. And yet Oakley does not leave us the sheer beauty of the place, with sunsets in golden hours in the bay.
Ruth can’t swim and fears the sea (Oakley, let’s assimilate the symbolic odds of this phobia), but she hears shirley’s magnetic recommendation that water is a wonderful healer and the cure of her own concern for dogs. a promise that is a little disconcerting, given the ugly hostility of Kai and his Alsatian. All of this leads to the moment Ruth takes a shower at non-unusual amenities and hears noise coming from an adjacent stall. Oakley mixes the timeline so that later in the film, it looks like we’re going back to that moment whose importance was suppressed at the time, or maybe we’re witnessing how Ruth reimagined it. In any case, narrative disorientation is elegant. It is a smart film and directed by experts; Oakley enjoys its winter freshness.
Make Up will be available at Curzon Home Cinema starting July 31.