Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Lawrence Gough
Starring: Ben Cura, Olivia Bonamy, Anton Lesser, Samuel West
Talk about starting with a bang! Opening in the immediate aftermath of a
hit and run, Lawrence Gough’s Gatecrash (with
co-writing credits to Alan Pattison and Terry Hughes, who
adapts from his original play) picks up with quarrelling poshos Nicole (Olivia Bonamy) and Steve (Ben Cura), who have only gone and knocked some poor
fella over while speeding home from a party. Stop and check if the victim
is alright? You’re joking! Not this pair, with their modish abode of
smoked glass and polished steel, their perfectly coiffed hair and inwardly
dismal, hateful relationship. It is always surface with these sorts of
arseholes, every single time. If they think can get away with it, then
they’ll try to: it’s what separates us from them, after all.
As the drama unfolds, Gough’s camera (with dop Mark Nutkins)
certainly recognises this, making an objective case study of Nicola and
Steve: trapping them in unforgiving medium shots, insidiously tracking the
pair in ominous Steadicam as they argue the implications of what has
happened. In the first five minutes we see Steve retrieve gruesome
evidence of broken spectacles stuck with blood and hair, before screaming
at Nicole that she’s a ‘fucking cunt’ and manhandling her onto the bed.
Gatecrash is 0 to 60 in seconds, bursting across the screen
in its opening moments like, well, some sort of person who gains entry
without invitation. Following this exhausting opening, you wonder where
the film has left to go...
The answer is nothing you would expect. It’s not so much that the
narrative turns of Gatecrash are surprising, more that the
plot developments are destabilisingly strange, unsettlingly leftfield and
coolly shocking. Hughes’ play debuted at Fringe festivals, and this
feature pleasingly retains the sort of confrontational artistry you would
expect from such origins. And so, after a two-hander which establishes
Steve as a bully, and Nicole as inscrutable, the narrative opens to
include Samuel West as a copper (or is he?, etc), who is ostensibly
combing the remote area for a reported prowler...
[Slight spoilers follow] It is now that
the film turns slightly on its axis, a deliciously menacing balancing act
of the intensely familiar (domestic setting, recognisable archetypes) and
the nightmarishly strange. The copper taunts the couple, intriguingly
focussing on Nicole like a woodentop conscience. He exhibits an
intimidation which, like Steve’s, is formulated through implicit threat
and barbed language, but is more sophisticated, more chilling than the
shouting and swearing which Steve resorts to. There is a way out here;
could Nicole come clean and save herself at least half the bother? Not
likely with the inconvenience of her doubled lined pregnancy test still
warm and wet in the bathroom...
But before we can process the bloodshed and violence which will complete
the film’s first act, Gatecrash flashes forward a year or
so. The couple have seemingly got away with the events of months ago
unscathed: Nicole has given birth, and Steve is still rich and full of
himself. The film’s time lapse and unresolved plotlines are a sublime
process of disorientation, a narrative malice which mirrors the coercion
of the film’s next snollygoster, Sid (Anton Lesser), who has turned
up (while Steve is opportunely absent) to thank the couple for driving him
to the hospital a year ago, after they had apparently found him in the
middle of the road left for dead after a hit and run... Yikes!
Lesser’s performance is insanely good. Simmering from calm waters to a
rolling boil, I would have loved to have seen this in a theatre, the
increasingly hostile rhythms of his language filling the room and
electrifying a live audience. The dramatic pedigrees of
Gatecrash are most evident here, that old adage of film
dialogue being overheard but theatrical communication always addressing
the third party of the audience: here fiercely so.
Gatecrash ends in visceral hostility, but this is second to
the impact of the devious vernaculars of its characters, their language
vibrant with threat and extortion. It is that Pinter/Beckett dialogue of
cruelty in scary effect, and it is telling that the moment where Steve
really begins to lose control involves Sid addressing Nicole in her native
French, a language that her husband (despite being married to a femme) has
no understanding of, and is excluded from.
Actually, writing about this film has made me want to watch it again,
immediately. So, that’s what I’m going to do, right now, and stop
scribbling before I further ruin its dark surprises and unsettling
cadences. Uniquely unnerving, I urge you to join me in appreciation of
this intense and subversive psychological horror. (Gate)crash bang wallop:
what a film!
Gatecrash is on UK Digital from
February 22nd.
