Little White Lies Issue 105

Directed by ANDREA ARNOLD Starring NYKIYA ADAMS, FRANZ ROGOWSKI, BARRY KEOGHAN Released 8 NOVEMBER ANTICIPATION Even being a little lukewarm on Cow, I’m always keen to catch up with Arnold. 4 ENJOYMENT Laughter, fear, tears – and more toad slime than I was expecting. 4 IN RETROSPECT A magical, energetic marvel from one of the UK’s finest filmmakers. 5 Grief is the spectre that haunts Andrea Arnold’s work like Catherine Earnshaw fated to forever roam the Yorkshire moors. Hauntings keep the past alive; this is not mere nostalgia, but a conscious carrying of the past with us into the present, for better or for worse. In Red Road, the devastated Jackie, still seeking justice for the death of her husband and daughter, is driven to make a heinous false accusation against their killer. Star,…

Andrea Arnold’s sixth feature, Bird, follows Bailey (Nykiya Adams) as she navigates life in a squat in Kent with her father Bug (Barry Keoghan) and her brother Hunter (Jason Buda). Her relationship with her father is volatile, and her brother and his friends are preoccupied with making and watching YouTube videos of people getting beaten up. Bailey cuts a lonely figure, until she meets the mysterious Bird (Franz Rogowski) who seems to be the hero that she is looking for. Arnold’s debut feature, Red Road, was released while I was studying film at Kent University in 2006. I was encouraged by a tutor to support a “local filmmaker” by going to see it at the Gulbenkian Cinema on campus, and so here began perhaps the most formative cinematic relationship of…

The now-common phrase, “fuck around and find out” is used as a cautionary note aimed at those wanting to embrace transgression in pursuit of pleasure, or any kind of social uplift. The characters in Andrea Arnold’s early films are women who are learning this lesson, and trying to push back against the punishments and pressures that have been meted out on them. In her debut short, Milk, from 1998, we meet a middle class woman named Hetty (Lynda Steadman) as she prepares to attend the funeral of her stillborn child. The barely-processed rage and confusion that festers inside lead her to flee the scene and head on a road trip in a stolen car with a dozy, drunken yob. How could love, sex, openness, trust, connection lead to this? The…

Obsession and observation uncover the complex nature of human behaviour in Andrea Arnold’s Cannes Jury Prize-winning debut feature Red Road. Named after the notorious Glasgow housing estate (demolished in 2015) where it is set, the film follows Kate Dickie’s surveillance operator, Jackie, who embarks on a dark quest for revenge when she spots a male figure (Tony Curran’s Clyde) from her past on one of her monitors. Jackie’s actions are initially mystifying, with Arnold only drip-feeding details about the nature of her relationship with this man. Like the grainy CCTV footage Jackie views on a daily basis, her decision to stalk and enact calculated vengeance makes for a murky, dread-filled and unpredictable journey. It’s potently directed and visually disarming, playing out as chilling psychological horror with the aspect of voyeurism…

To be a child is often to be utterly invested in one’s own subjective perception. Centred on a 15-year-old teenager, Andrea Arnold’s 2009 film Fish Tank pays homage to that almost universally difficult age when the reassuring blinders of childhood start to come off: alarmingly, the outside world slowly creeps into our field of vision, causing much uncertainty and confusion. In that awkward period, it seems every other decision we make is followed by the cruel realisation that it was actually a mistake. How do we stand back up after so much humiliation? How do we go on? Mia (Katie Jarvis), the young girl at the heart of Arnold’s film, powers through these feelings with anger and determination. Reacting with ire and violence to all attempts at communication, she rejects…

Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights leaves an impression not as narrative, as Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel does, but as an example of sensory memory: mist; wind; rain; dirt. It is as far from prestige television costume drama as literary adaptation gets, scarcely bothering to follow the plot at all, instead focusing on the coming-of-age of its well-worn protagonists Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. This is no moor-based frolicking à la Kate Bush, glamorous A-list acting from the likes of Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, and certainly none of whatever Emerald Fennell might be planning for her upcoming spin. Arnold’s film is Brontë country as tableaux; a fractured series of visceral images and soundscapes forming an impression of a novel. The film was not always set to follow this less well-trodden path through…