As far as we’re aware, no one’s yet coined a catchy mumblecore-style name for them yet, but one of the most exciting things to emerge in British cinema since the turn of the century is a wave of new female filmmakers whose work, while quite different from one another, definitely shares a certain kinship. The films of Lynne Ramsay, Andrea Arnold, Clio Barnard and Carol Morley all draw from a certain tradition of British social realism, and all find ways to heighten or twist it in fascinating ways. But their work has proven very, very different from one another in ways that frustrates any attempt to define them as a “movement,” but that nevertheless make it feel that there’s some kind of synchronicity going on.
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Well, add to their number Hope Dickson Leach. A former assistant to Todd Solondz, and an award-winning shorts filmmaker, Dickson Leach makes her feature debut with “The Levelling,” and it’s one of the most impressive and assured first films we’ve seen in a long while, a wrenchingly moving, beautifully executed work that exists in a similar space to films from Ramsay, Arnold and co., but very much does its own thing, too.
The film’s set in the aftermath of the devastating floods that wracked Somerset, in the west of England, in 2014, as Clover Catto (Ellie Kendrick, best known for playing Meera Reed on “Game Of Thrones”), a young veterinary student on the verge of graduating, returns home to the family cattle farm. The house is uninhabitable, having been badly damaged by the water and the insurance company refusing to pay out, but an even more awful tragedy has taken place.
During a party, her brother Harry died of a gunshot wound, which may have been “a stupid bloody accident,” as one character puts it, or may have been suicide. Her father (David Troughton) is firmly in denial, and Harry’s best friend James (Jack Holden) is evasive. Nevertheless, as she grapples with her grief and her difficult relationship with her dad, Clover is determined to find out the reason that her brother might have taken his own life.
It’s rare enough to see a rural setting like this in British film, and doubly so in this particular version of it, outside of a period piece: This is a sort of rural middle class — landowners at one point well-off enough to send Clover to boarding school, but not so well off that one crisis can’t put them in dire financial straits. It’s a potent and underexplored place to set a story, and Dickson Leach’s film feels fresh as a daisy as a result.
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She has real storytelling chops as well (she also penned the script). Though the film’s set entirely on the farm itself, a canny use of the budget that never feels like the film’s being boxed in, there’s an almost noir-ish structural feel to the way that Clover digs into her brother’s death, though the film never quite becomes a genre piece either. Slivers of information are parceled out carefully, but each one doesn’t just move the story forward: They also teach us about the characters and their relationships, too.
Again, in a smart use of resources, there are only three major characters (though the presence of Harry haunts the film to such an extent that it feels like he’s a fourth, though he rarely appears properly on screen), and all the actors are uniformly excellent. Holden gives all kinds of off-screen life to the smallest role of the three, while Troughton, a veteran character actor familiar to British TV viewers, is wonderful as the father, a man whose natural state of emotional repression shows further cracks with each day that passes. And as stern as he can be, there’s never any doubt how much he loved his children.
But it’s Kendrick who dominates the film, being in almost every scene, and it’s an astonishing performance, one of the most impressive depictions of grief we can remember. Kendrick plays Clover with sustained notes of devastation, anxiety and overwhelming sadness, letting other emotions crack through — her smile or laugh, when they come, are like the sunshine breaking the clouds — but never shaking off the trauma of missing her brother. It’s a risky thing for any performer to do, but she consistently finds new ways to tell us her about the character, and it should be a star-making performance as a result, reminding us of Jennifer Lawrence in “Winter’s Bone,” for one.
And Dickson Leach more than serves her: “The Levelling” is an incredibly controlled piece of filmmaking, an ever-roaming handheld camera always finding the shot that’ll give you the most insight or catching a detail in the landscape (the photography by Nanu Segal is exceptional). The film’s interspersed with some more expressionistic moments, too, including a recurring motif of a hare swimming through floodwater that proves the perfect visual metaphor for the film.
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With some excellent sound design and an innovative score by Hutch Demouilpied, the film creates a very particular, very distinct mood, mournful but never becoming completely bleak, realistic but never quite down-to-earth, ominous but always deeply human. Only very occasionally do the seams show — particularly early on, some of the dialogue feels a bit on-the-nose and lacking in subtext.
But those moments are few and far between, and for the most part it seems like a movie made by someone who’s been making features for years, not a first-time filmmaker. But beyond that, it isn’t just one of the best debut films of the year, but one of the year’s best films, period. [A]
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