Tag: British

Kindred

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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Fiona Shaw is a national treasure. As the terrifying matriarch at the heart of Kindred, she shrieks and scowls, scoffs and shocks with venomous glee. Occupying a central space in this British pregnancy horror, she reminds us that she is one of the best actors working today.

An indication of her character Margaret’s entitlement comes quickly into the film. When she is told by her son Ben (Edward Holcroft) and girlfriend Charlotte (Tamara Lawrence) that they are moving to Australia, her reaction is of pure disgust. How can they leave her and her enormous manor behind? But why wouldn’t they want to leave? She is a dark and difficult woman, constantly doted upon by her “nice guy” stepson Thomas (an excellent Jack Lowdon).

Things suddenly change when veterinarian Ben dies in a horse-related accident. Charlotte, suddenly pregnant despite being on the pill, blacks out in the hospital and awakens in this large, ancestral home, replete with long corridors, creaky floorboards and various other Bric-à-brac. She wants to use her phone. It’s broken. She wants to go back to her home. It’s been foreclosed. She wants to go to a hospital? Thomas can take her… No matter the reason, Charlotte finds herself unable to get out or contact anyone.

Charlotte is black but her race is never mentioned in the film. Nonetheless, it seems to be an exploration of the well-documented ways Black women are more likely to be disbelieved than white women, especially in a medical setting. Charlotte is constantly being gaslighted, from the small things — like complaints about dizziness being waved away— to the large, like the amazing moment when she tells a nurse that she is being kidnapped to remarkable indifference. There is also the fact that these large legacy homes across the UK are notoriously white spaces, making Charlotte a constant stranger despite technically being part of the family.

While engaging in the odd symbol here and there — the reappearance of the horse shot like its come straight from a Lloyds commercial, and a flock of birds straight out of Hitchcock — this horror leans more family thriller than supernatural. And unlike many big theme horrors that have come out in recent years, which lean on metaphor and feeling more than good old-fashioned storytelling, debut director Joe Marcantonio has a great eye for set up and pay-off, making it a remarkably entertaining movie. A fair point can be made that the hereditary theme isn’t really explored at all, but it’s not much of a big deal when the film is just this much fun.

With constant twists and turns, delightful red herrings and moments of genuine suspense, Kindred has ounces of flair. Supported by three remarkable performances, including Tamara Lawrence’s steely resilience, Lowdon’s skin-crawling creep act, and Fiona Shaw’s scene-chewing monologues, and this is easily the best British horror of the year. Expect a warm reception back in Britain.

Kindred plays as out of competition in the First Feature strand at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

Cordelia

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Antonia Campbell Hughes plays the eponymous character, a distracted actress still reeling from a terrorist attack on the Underground. One of the very few survivors, she compares herself to a rat, unsure how to reassemble her life. Yet she still believes that she has her life under control, rehearsing for a play in the West End that has the potential to revitalise her wayward career. But when her twin sister (also Hughes) skips off to Bruges for the weekend with her new boyfriend, Cordelia finds herself far more vulnerable than she thought. Constant phone calls, with no voice on the other end, do little to alleviate her anxiety.

Director Adrian Shergold has a great knack for constructing unsettling moments that make us think one step ahead of our characters. Men seem to appear out of nowhere; first mere faces in the crowd before slowly coming into Cordelia’s rearview. One innocuous meeting between Cordelia and an old friend on Millennium Bridge is filled with portent; both sides skirting around the issue with passive aggressive politeness.

Cordelia

Yet, she isn’t totally impervious to people of the opposite sex, lulled by the melancholic cello sounds of her upstairs neighbor Frank (Johnny Flynn). He accosts her at a coffee shop, and asks if the music bothers her. When she replies that the music is beautiful, he invites her for a drink in an empty Soho joint.

Musician-actor Johnny Flynn puts in a fascinating performance, relying on his good looks to give us a false sense of security before slowly revealing the tortured man underneath. Constantly talking about his failed music career, which once spanned concerts from Buenos Aires to Moscow, his overt friendliness feels almost immediately like a trap. Yet she only sees his vulnerability, seemingly happy to find someone she can confide her deepest concerns in.

Their doomed romance unravels in a bizarre, interesting way, its denouement occupying the last third of the film. With its focus on feminine paranoia as well as its dark vision of London, Cordelia evokes classic British 1940s psychological thrillers such as Gaslight (1940, 1944) ,as well as early Hitchcock. Dim lamps and dark interiors give Cordelia’s flat a murky feeling, the streets of Soho consisting only of the iconic overhanging lamps. Characters are often shot head on, making them feel like part of the furniture.

Yet the supporting cast are subsumed by this world. British luminaries such as Joel Fry, Alun Armstrong and Catherine McCormack are given little chance to stand out. Michael Gambon for example, is severely under-utilised as one of Cordelia’s neighbors, briefly introduced before barely being seen again. These types of thrillers, especially of the old-school variety, thrive on prying and nosey neighbours — providing ironic levity to an otherwise grim experience.

While worth watching for its well-constructed sets and foreboding production design, creating a convincing portrait of a dark and gloomy London, it can’t corral its mood into something energising. Much like its lighting, Cordelia is too dim to electrify the audience.

Cordelia is in cinemas on Friday, October 23rd. On Sky Cinema and NOW on October 19th (2021). Also available on other platforms:

Around the Sun

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

Ever wonder if things may have turned out differently? Would a pithy remark with that boy or girl at the bar have changed anything? This is the power of first impressions, and it is a central notion of Around the Sun.

The film’s lean 89 minutes follows Maggie (Cara Theobold), an estate agent, and Bernard (Gethin Anthony), a film scout, as they walk and talk in a decrepit French chateau. They’re strangers to each other, yet they waste no time with small talk. Their wandering conversations mention everything from ex-partners to existential struggles, but their main topic is Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, a French author who penned Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds while a resident at the chateau.

As Maggie explains the book’s plot – which is a series of celestial conversations between a philosopher and an aristocratic woman – it becomes clear that life is imitating art. Indeed, Maggie and Bernard’s dynamic is reminiscent of Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995), and this conceit has a share of strengths and weaknesses.

The immediate problem lies with the performances; Theobold and Anthony’s dynamic just feels unnatural and scripted, especially when one or the other squirms to point out they meant no offence. However, the quality is redressed as the multiversal narrative unfolds, which splits and reimagines the story several times, presenting the characters with different traits and energies. This redrawing of Maggie and Bernard sees the actors’ performances come into their own, bolstering our hopes for their romance.

After all, these are characters of resonant, empathetic detail. They’re both wanderers without a calling: Maggie is far too learned for her job, while Bernard dropped law school to pursue a career with the meretricious hope of travel, “you can never just be in a place, you’ve always got to pay attention”. When their dynamic is at its strongest, we have a pair of urbane yet rudderless souls, and whether they will finally elope depends on the audience’s careful viewing of this detailed, erudite romantic drama.

Around the Sun is on VoD on Tuesday, August 4th.

Bad Guys

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

Roger Corman, the pope of pop cinema, once said: “The worst thing you can do is have a limited budget and try to do some big looking film. That’s when you end up with very bad work.” Happily, with a nano-budget of just £200, indie filmmakers Jack Sambrook and Will Unsworth are well aware of their limitations, and Bad Guys is all the better for it.

Corman learned the ropes with trashy horror movies, but this Brighton duo have drawn inspiration from the kitchen sink flavours of the British indie scene, namely Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and Down Terrace. As a result, the film’s influences are worn on its sleeve, but this is all part of the Corman philosophy – watch a load of movies, understand how they work, and turn this knowledge into your own cineliterate, nuts-and-bolts feature.

The story, which is a road trip-cum-crime caper, follows Gaz (Sambrook) and Cal (Unsworth), a pair of lowly debt collectors operating in a grey and gloomy Brighton. The dynamic is one you can imagine – Gaz is aloof and stand-offish, while Cal is loquacious, reckless and prone to violent outbursts. When Cal’s temper kills a man, the young men are ordered to drive the body north and bury it in the countryside.

The film’s bleak tone is framed by Rowan Holford’s striking cinematography, which combines long static shots and handheld work that skilfully balances rawness and fluidity. Particularly absorbing are the driving montages through Britain’s bypasses and winding, canopied B-roads, deftly capturing the motion and sensation of travel. Indeed, there is an elemental streak that runs throughout Bad Guys, which is complemented by Matt Unsworth’s orchestral, Carter Burwell-inflected score.

The real draw, however, is the chemistry between the leads. Sambrook is appropriately crabby as Gaz, making the rules as he goes along in an attempt to control Cal, who chinwags with anyone who’ll listen. Gaz does lighten up, though, and their exchanges consider everything from petrol station confectionary to a revelatory discussion of the female urethra. The dialogue never feels contrived and no wisecracks fall flat, which is a reflection of the leads’ performances and their collaboration on the script.

Another merit is a small but marked flair for suspense, which is ratcheted in a bathroom encounter between Gaz and a faceless, ominous stranger. It reminds you that these young men, barely into their twenties, are in a grave situation with some very dubious people.

We love indie film here at DMovies, so it is always a delight when an accomplished nano-budget feature like Bad Guys appears on our radar. Sambrook and Unsworth will have more cash for their next film, no doubt, but this won’t mar their grounded, kitchen sink sensibilities – it will bolster them.

Bad Guys is available on Amazon Prime in the UK now.

A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life

Posted on by victorfraga

We’ve all had that friend, that one person who looks in every direction for an answer to their life. Lou Farnt (Katie Brayben) is that 30-year -old, surrounding her life in self-coach tapes and books, desperate for a life away from her controlling, self-satisfying mother. When Val (Poppy Roe), a precocious life coach brimming with worldly ambition, arrives in her hometown, Lou decides to travel with her. On the surface, it seems like a deal from heaven, Lou escaping the confines of her lowly town for a high-octane journey across Britain’s alternative therapy camps. Yet it’s apparent to everyone that Val hasn’t told Lou everything, as bodies start lining outside the tents the women share. It’s the kookiest script Simon Pegg never wrote, a bloody delicious one at that!

The one-liners slash through the proceedings like sharp, gut-throbbing belly laughs. Arriving at their premier camp, Lou packs the duos bags unwittingly on top of a pallid, pale corpse that sits in their boot. Their varied meditative coaches (one of them Fleabag’s Sian Clifford, discussing the horrific serenity of childbirth with a sharp Scottish accent), aroused as they are by life, are only moments, dalliances and knife cuts away from death. Together, the pair find themselves growing more and more attached to the art of killing. “You’re my best life coach” Lou attests, her mouth free from the vomit she’s just spewed. “You might be my best client” Val replies, leading her comrade to their next victim. Wicked stuff!

There’s a point being addressed behind all the choking and beatings. Ben Lloyd-Hughes stars as Chuck Knoah, an oily haired coach who addresses the needs of his customers with monetary, instead of medicinal, interest. Faced with the two assailants, Knoah sees the value in crime, offering his kidnappers the chance to co-author their work. In a world of Netflix serials situated on serial killers, internet videos intoxicatexd with violence and sex and family comedies that names their characters after the insidious Doctor Harold Shipman, the film addresses the sick fantasies audiences expect from the real world. Lloyd-Hughes is excellent as a scenery chewing theorist, but Roe is the real star, discussing the starved needs of Sudanese babies with the same decided measures she brings to bashing a hostess’ head with a wooden bread roller. Feisty eyed, lasso-haired and tight-lipped, Val makes one of the most exciting villains of the last 20 years. Dirtylicious!

A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life is on VoD on Monday, January 13th.

Philophobia

Posted on by victorfraga

In an agrarian English atmosphere, young aspiring writer Kai (Joshua Glanister) wakes himself to the call of adulthood, understanding the bonds that keep love and friendship together. This is a love story, first loves are always a part of adolescent journeys, but the film is ultimately a love of friendship. Collecting his mate Megsy (Jack Gouldbourne) from his mother’s house, the pair head to the library, distracting themselves from examination practice through cigarette smoke conversations. There, they talk about the simple pleasures of life; their future careers, their future habitats, their future wanks.

It reminds me of Ricky Gervais’s admirable Cemetery Junction (2010), but this effort is more noteworthy, the cast members, the accents and the clothing outfits a key part of every-day Northern England. Two of the older cast members are of the Game of Thrones variety (Harry Lloyd and James Faulkner), making it abundantly clear that this film has mainstream aspirations to adhere to. One of funniest moments comes as the trio of young boys race over the cobbled town roofs, seeking shelter from the policeman whose handcuffs await them.

And yet the cinematography is occasionally guilty of feeling and looking like a television movie, one simulated sex scene beneath a tree is distressingly pornographic instead of lithe and beautiful. Lead actress Kim Spearman occasionally fails to meet the ethereal demands she needs to keep as writerly concubine Grace.

Glanister, however, is excellent, a steely eyed, petrified boy, eager and anxious to embrace the future that awaits. He yearns for a symbol, any symbol, pointing to the horn headed luxury a stag offers him. Obsessing over the animal with fixated fervour, the stag crops up in his daily conversations, embracing the pen by which he hopes to write his best-selling book. Conflicted, conflated, conditioned and immeasurably preoccupied with the opposite sex, Glanister occupies the innermost darkest anxieties felt, but never spoken about, in the common teenage male. Silent, his voluminous glares speak unimaginable decisions that awaited, await and will await him.

It’s a love letter to the absence of adulthood, the boredom of adolescence and the fighting spirit that captures the young heart. It’s a tale of young love, and a telling reminder that the greatest loves of our lives aren’t necessarily the people we share our beds with, but those we share our chats with.

Philophobia showed at the 23rd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in London on Saturday, March 21st, as part of the London Independent Film Festival. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, October 30th.

Muscle

Posted on by victorfraga

This is a movie packed with a toxic mixture of testosterone and steroids. Simon (Cavan Clerkin) works in a call centre cold phoning prospective clients in search of their credit card number. He has a pretty partner and stable home, yet monotony seems to have taken its toll on him. His small beer belly epitomises both his passivity and frustration. So he joins the local gym, in an attempt to inject some vim and vigour into his life.

The highly intrusive and aggressive personal trainer Terry (Fairbrass) approaches Simon almost immediately, telling him that he’ll quickly cripple himself if doesn’t learn how to lifts weights properly. The 55-year old Eastenders and Rise of the Footsoldier star here plays the character he knows best: the tough guy/manipulative conman. The inexperienced Simon is easily persuaded, and soon takes up Terry’s “services”. He’s virtually forced to take steroids, making him fickle, irritable and violent. As a consequence, his partners simply packs up and leaves, and he also loses his office job.

Gradually, Terry takes control of virtually every aspect of Simon’s life, assisting in every step of his personal collapse and deconstruction. He eventually moves in, bringing a prostitute friend along. The once respectable office employee has now become an informal worker reliant on his personal trainer. The once clean and civilised flat has now turned into a party and drug den, where orgies are routinely held.

Terry is highly volatile and outburst-prone. Expletive-laden rants and threats are the norm. He does not allow Simon to make decisions. Fairbrass’s character represents a grotesque type of hyper-masculinity that’s incompatible with modern conviviality. Yet he’s strangely enticing. Even seductive. Perhaps this bromance could develop into something else. Something sexual? Something lethal? Or could this erratic lifestyle slip into criminality?

This 109-minute black and white thriller has enough twists and turns to keep you guessing the nature of Terry’s elusive personality and also of his relationship to Simon up until the very end. Plus the photography of the barren and lifeless suburbs and industrial estates of Newcastle makes for gripping viewing. This is a movie satisfactory enough for fans of British thrillers/neo-noir. But that’s about it. It has little to offer in terms of innovation, and mostly sticks to trite old formulas.

Muscle showed in Competition at the 23rd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on BFI Player on Monday, September 4th (2023). On Sky and NOW in June. On most VoD platforms from July

Tales from the Lodge

Posted on by victorfraga

In a quaint and remote lodge somewhere in the idyllic English countryside, a small group of friends meets up in order to scatter the ashes of their friend Jonesy, who tragically drowned in the local lake a few years earlier. Some of these people are facing some sort of painful predicament: Martha’s husband is terminally ill, while Emma is struggling with motherhood, and so on. The jaunty Paul, on the other hand, is in high spirits and wishes to party. He and his girlfriend Miki stir up the already existing tensions. Then a mysterious murderer appears. This is more or less how the story goes. Not that it makes much sense. I couldn’t make head or tail of the story. In fact, I had to read the press notes in order to write this introductory paragraph.

Tales from the Lodge is genuinely one of the most disjointed and unintentionally ridiculous films that I have seen in a long time. And I watch a lot of films. It works neither as a black comedy nor as a horror movie. There are no jump scares. The humour is tedious and trite. The jokes are hardly witty: ““It’s so peaceful in here that the kids would love it: there are no cars and no paedophiles”. The ashes of Jonesy fly on the eyes and mouth of one of the mourning friends as the wind blows the content of the urn. A fat character who looks like “Kiefer Sutherland” appears in a bizarre cutaway gag. The sex scene is cringeworthy. The zombie make-up and the special effects are awful. The plot twist at the end conjures up the three inevitable letters:” WTF?”. This is not slapstick. This is not wilfully preposterous. This is a combination of atrocious script writing, shambolic camerawork and clumsy acting.

The only frightening thing about Tales from the Lodge is that it could get a theatrical release. That is the real joke. It is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, November 1st. Scream and run away from it as fast as you can!

A Bump Along the Way

Posted on by victorfraga

Thankfully, this isn’t a Northern Irish film about a girl growing up in The Troubles. Instead,this is a Northern Irish film about a girl growing up through her very own and personal troubles. Allegra (Lola Petticrew), a dewy-eyed teenager, walks through the streets that fought for identity in a way not dissimilar to how she fights for her identity. As she struggles through school, Allegra puts up with taunts mocking her Italian name and her care free mothers’ insouciant lifestyle. Described by her mother as 15-going-on-50, Allegra feels the burden of adulthood. As she fights for her coming-of-age, her mother Pamela (Bronagh Gallagher) admits to her of an impending birth, given to her by a man she barely knows anything about.

Gallagher is brilliant, but Petticrew is the real star of the piece. She walks by the water, wading the puddles her mother will soon face in a maternity ward. The silence works on Petticrew, starry-eyed as she looks to the beauty her best friends’ boyfriend holds. This silent discretion becomes one of public indiscretion as the cruel effects of alcohol loosen her tight-lipped tongue. Faced with her own embarrassment to match her mother’s, Allegra screams at her parent, agreeing with her dead grandmother that Pamela is an embarrassment.

Like most mothers do, Pamela takes the laceration from daughter by reminding herself of the struggles adolescence holds. Crueller lacerations come from the two men who gifted/burdened her with pregnancies, one reluctant to open his chequebook, the other flatly refusing to do so. The father of her unborn child pushes by her on pathways, her anxiety and discomfort rewarded neither by pardon nor apology. The father of her teenage daughter is a little better. Busying himself in Belfast, he boasts about his considerable success, yet finds little reason to visit Allegra on her 16th birthday. What starts off as a sickly sweet Richard Curtis affair soon turns into a feisty, fiery feminist movie with some dirtylicious pearls of wisdom about fatherhood.

And yet the film never veers from the dysfunctional into the disturbing. Between the two women, there is great love felt, not least when Allegra asks her mother the joys and trials pregnancy provides. Beautiful.

A Bump Along the Way is in cinemas Friday, October 11th.

Tell Me Who I Am

Posted on by victorfraga

Seventeen-year-old Alex Lewis suffered a near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1982, which left him in a profound comma. Upon waking up, he immediately recognised his identical twin Marcus, who was on his bedside. However, he failed to identify his mother and his very own identity. He also forgot everything that he had experienced up to that date. It was like being born again. Marcus had to remind him of his past, and to teach him the most menial tasks, such as operating household devices.

Alex gradually realised that there was something unusual about his aristocratic upbringing. His mother was caring and yet very distant. His stepfather was entirely emotionally absent. He learnt that the brothers only went on holidays with friends, and never with their own parents. Fifteen years later, their mother passed away, and Alex came across come unsettling evidence that something very untoward and non-motherly had taken place throughout their youth. He confronts Marcus, but his brother is simply too scared, and refuses to open up.

More than two decades later, Oscar-nominated Ed Perkins interviews both brothers separately in the first two acts of the movie. They are now married men in the fifties with children of their own. They are given the opportunity to open up and to face the demons that have tormented them for so long. At one point, a teary Marcus reveals the morbid details of what had happened in their youth. It wasn’t just an isolated event, but instead a harrowing and yet normalised pattern. His confession is recorded and played back to his brother, who is perplexed to learn the truth. In the third and final act, the two brothers meet up and finally talk about the unspeakable, in an attempt to reconcile their differences and leave the horrific past behind.

The gigantic mansion where the family lived (located somewhere in rural England) is constantly featured in the film, from both inside and outside. It gives the film a sombre and mysterious tone. The old-fashioned timber frame house has a dark driveway and a creepy pearly gate – the stuff of horror movies. The naked tree branches cast a shadow over the dwelling and the existence of the two adults. The photographs from a disturbing past in the attic provide the final touch to this sinister story.

But this is not a horror film. It’s not exploitative, either. The brothers open up at their own pace, and the director seems to respect their wishes and fears. This is a movie about reconciliation. It’s also a very brave endeavour, which will encourage other males who have suffered a similar ordeal to come forward and heal their very own wounds. There is a taboo associated with masculinity that makes this story very painful and embarrassing. Horrific things can happen to people regardless of class, gender and nationality.

Tell me Who I am is in UK cinemas and also on Netflix on Friday, October 18th.

Gwen

Posted on by victorfraga

Poor Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) has the weight of the world on her shoulders. Sharing a bleak cottage with her mother Elen (Maxine Peake) and little sister Mari (Jodie Innes), the vulnerable trio, unprotected by a father absent at war (probably the Crimean War), are under threat to move out as the neighbouring slate mine has an eye on their property to expand its operations. Gwen’s mother is unsympathetic as she is so stressed, constantly shouting at her and, often unreasonably, ordering her about. Her only companion is little Mari and her only consolation the smile of a handsome boy, Harri Morris (Gwion Glyn), who fancies her at the local chapel, which they attend every Sunday.

The family is threatened by frightening incidents. A sheep’s heart is nailed to their front door and their sheep are killed in the night. The sinister Mr. Wynne (Mark Lewis Jones) takes Elen aside after chapel and tries to persuade her to give up her cottage and land. She refuses. It is her home for her and her daughters and will remain so to await the return of her absent husband (the whole family is shown briefly happily re-united in former times). The forces of greedy capitalism will not be assuaged. The film builds up to an horrific climax at which the two young girls must flee their home.

The film is set in the beautiful but harsh landscape of Snowdonia in Wales. Great storm clouds gather over the mountains and eventually break into loud thunderclaps and increase the sound of the moaning wind that constantly fills the air round the cottage. Mists shroud the atmosphere out of which occasionally emerge threatening figures. The film is self-consciously a horror movie as well as a piece of social documentation. The horror is not only the usual Gothic side-effects but the injustice which the family must endure. The mother cuts herself to let out “sin”, she turns around at Gwen in her bedroom, seemingly made hideous by some disease, a horse that has been injured must be put down and hacked to pieces for meat to feed the family. Gwen cannot bear to kill the horse, that has bolted off after being frightened by a clap of thunder, or chop him up, so it is done by the bad-tempered mother. Gwen presents a picture of innocence continually tormented by the cruelty and harshness of the world.

This story is continually bleak. Except for the smile of the boy in the chapel and occasional sympathy of the local doctor (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), who, anyway, later falsely accuses Gwen of stealing some medicine, there is no relief from the depression and misery. Some may find this an overdrawn aspect of the Gothic effects of the film.

What Gwen does successfully convey, however, is the misery that befell so many of the peasantry in the United Kingdom in the mid-nineteenth century as the ways of capitalism and economic “improvement” strode across the country breaking up traditional ways of life, settled villages and family life. In the Highlands of Scotland, during the “Highland Clearances”, the Gaelic-speaking peasantry were thrown off their lands for the sake of more economic sheep farming. In Ireland (most of which was then part of the United Kingdom) the peasantry was evicted from their cottages, allowed to starve to death in ditches or flee to America in the wake of the Great Famine of the 1840’s. Not all of this was deliberate, but it was found to be highly convenient for the British government in clearing, what was then called, “rural congestion”. Likewise in Wales, the coal and slate mines broke up traditional communities to advance their ends.

Whether people were driven from their cottages quite in the way depicted at the end of Gwen may be debatable, but the horror motifs well convey the injustice of it all and the helplessness of those who tried to stand in the way of an all-powerful capitalism. Elen, if she had been less brave, would have sold her land to the powerful Mr. Wynne. She and her daughters, with a fairly small settlement, would have settled elsewhere in Wales, forgot their memories of their homestead, and become one of the numberless workers at the pitheads or slate mines of the Industrial Revolution. Such is the story of so many of the Welsh working class.

Gwen is in cinemas on Friday, July 19th. On VoD on Monday, November 11th.