***/**** (3.5 stars)
DVD Release
Sent to live with her cousins
deep in the British countryside, American teenager Daisy initially resists
their attempts to involve her in their way of life. As the summer wears on, the
shadow of World War 3 seeps into their lives.
This was a surprisingly tough
film. I’ll admit that I didn’t pay much attention to the certification of the
film before I started watching, and found myself watching an incredibly grim,
mature and, frankly, quite disturbing, story about the world descending into
anarchy in the face of an unspecified enemy. Indeed, there is a great deal of
abject grimness, not least the murder of children, scenes of rape, a
distressing scene involving an aeroplane, and countless dead bodies. The second
half of the film is such a tonal shift from the first, wherein a teenage girl
overcomes her fears and self-imposed rules, falls in love with a handsome man,
and spends the summer swimming the idyllic rivers, that they actually feel like
two separate films. It is a credit, therefore, to the young and talented cast,
that the story remains tangible and emotionally raw, as the characters could
have easily become lost in the descent into madness.
The film is undoubtedly flawed.
Daisy’s character (Soarise Ronan) is rushed and underdeveloped – she arrives
stroppy and angst-ridden, and all too quickly softens under the gaze of
resident hunk, Eddie (George MacKay), who has an unspecified connection with
animals. This isn’t to say that Ronan and MacKay aren’t as much a pleasure to
view as they usually are, their characters are just rather vapid and empty at
the beginning, and the teenage cliché that a handsome man falling in love with
you will change your outlook on life continues to annoy me. The first section
of the film, then, feels too short, whilst the second half is taut enough, and
laced with enough dread to make the viewer feel very uncomfortable. There are
also strange sequences throughout the second half, lucid dream states in which
Daisy and Eddie appear to be communicating with each other, and end up running
through a twilight forest in the nude. I appreciate that this could be
interpreted as showing the turbulence of war, or the state of Daisy’s mind, but
there sudden appearance seemed off-kilter and too abstract.
For all the things I found
irritating, however, I did enjoy the film… although maybe ‘enjoy’ is the wrong
word. I found myself repeatedly shocked at what was happening on screen, and
whilst the violence was not always explicit, the remains of conflict were just
as distressing. Supporting the young cast is a beautifully shot, bucolic
British countryside, and yet an unnerving sense of dread hangs over the film
from the very first frame, making this a tense and emotionally raw film, as
opposed to your average young adult piece of fiction.
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