Set in the squelchy, crushed-flat fields and pongy, primeval marshes of Norfolk’s Broadlands, this maddeningly oblique, somewhat pretentious drama has a great landscape and interesting faces to look at, filmed with inventive style by Tim Sidell who’s clearly watched a lot of Alexander Sokurov films. But writer-director Martin Radich’s script plays like a bag of jagged shards broken off from other miserabilist rural-set British films. Just like the Fenland-set The Goob (2014), for instance, writer-director Martin Radich’s work has its own menacing patriarch (Denis Ménochet), a winsome, educationally deprived teenage boy (Barry Keoghan) and a pretty east European immigrant (Lithuanian Goda Letkauskaitė, cast after being spotted in a Norwich park) all thrown into conflict when the son (none of the characters have actual names) discovers the father is a kind of mercenary. Or maybe just a madman. Either way, it seems he kills people and may or may not have done away with his own wife. British character actors Eileen Davies and Sean Buckley are also on hand, seething and spitting and generally adding to the film’s Hogarthian panorama of weirdness, but the whole fetid shebang is a drag over feature length and would have been improved by losing an hour off the running time.
