Actor turned film-maker Antonia Campbell-Hughes goes out on a limb here with her feature directing project: a film which is also an experiment in mood and feeling. It’s an interesting if flawed movie, and I wasn’t sure some of the line-readings and the big dialogue scenes completely came off; but this is the work of a director with a real sense of landscape and place.
The scene is the north of Ireland, where a smooth and self-satisfied young businessman has arrived on a short visit: Hamish, played by Cosmo Jarvis, who is alienated from his father, played by Claes Bang, seen only on Zoom calls. Hamish has been bequeathed a remote cottage by an aunt (that is, his mother’s sister) in her will and now he wants to see it. From the outset, the mood is strange, oppressive: Hamish misinterprets some friendly chat from the receptionist (Pauline Hutton) organising his hire car at the airport as a come-on, and is coldly rude. And there is a catastrophe on the road when another car driven by teenage kids crashes into his. Hamish survives, but one teen in the other car is killed.
This event, together with a growing realisation of the truth about his mother’s upbringing and young womanhood in this place, seems to send Hamish into a kind of breakdown. He discharges himself from hospital too early and tries removing the cast from his broken arm far too soon: a brutal scene. This is all happening as he becomes close to the young survivor of the crash: Evan (Rhys Mannion). Is he attracted to Evan, or could it be that he sees Evan as some sort of alternative self? This is a strange spectacle, an essay in guilt and the need to heal a damaged past: a forthright and fiercely intended drama.
• It Is in Us All is released on 23 September in cinemas.
