With their excellent 2011 comedy Black Pond, British film-makers Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley became two of the youngest Bafta nominees in history. Now they are back with a movie of strangeness and charm, co-written by Sharpe with newcomer Tiani Ghosh: it is tonally elusive, its comedy credentials interestingly ambiguous. The film is disquieting and sad, hitting an eerie elegaic note for a loss that isn’t immediately comprehensible.
Sharpe plays Zac, a young guy whose exasperatingly stroppy yet lovable sister Alice (played by Ghosh) has gone off on a canal trip in the narrowboat where she had been living with her boyfriend Toby (Joe Thomas). Then the couple just vanished. At first Zac is frantic with worry, aggressive with the police officers who aren’t too fussed about yet another missing-person case; finally, and heartbreakingly, he embarks on a social media “Find Alice” campaign, in which he tries striking an upbeat, optimistic note.
Zac’s anti-odyssey of affectless futility is interspersed with flashbacks to his difficult time with Alice, who seemed to be making a mess of her life until she miraculously met Toby, a love affair that took her away from Zac, his protection and his yuppie-aspirational circle of well-connected schoolfriends.
Sharpe, Kingsley and Ghosh could be playing with cinephile references to L’Atalante and L’Avventura: there is a funny moment when Toby says he prefers foreign films, because he doesn’t need to know what’s going on. I liked the Zen note of grief-suppressing puzzlement, particularly from Toby’s dad, played by Chris Langham. The film could be a bit indulgent for some and I wasn’t sure about Zac’s outburst of bad temper. But it’s absorbing, intelligent work.
