Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Phil Sheerin
Starring: Emma Mackey, Anson Boon, Charlie Murphy, Mark McKenna, Michael
McElhatton
The Winter Lake, a gloomy debut feature from Phil Sheerin, along with
writer/scorer (impressive!) David Turpin, establishes a primordial
Ireland in its claggy opening scenes. In a bare woodland our young
protagonist implies his troubled nature by scraping out the blacked skull
of a dead farm animal with a hand knife: the marshland where this happens
is wet and cold, the surrounding soil and sedge treacherous. A gravestone
grey sky is enormous and unforgiving.
These elemental signifiers set the harsh tone of what is to follow in
The Winter Lake’s narrative, a brutal story wherein raw urges and instincts have lead to
ugly death. It’s a relief when Tom (Anson Boon) is called back to
the grey cottage where he presumably lives by a woman across the way.
Judging her maternal insistence, we may guess that this woman (Elaine -
Charlie Murphy) is Tom’s mom, although, her age makes this seem
unlikely (Boon is 21, and although I couldn’t find any concrete details,
Murphy can’t be more than 10 years older surely?).
It turns out that they are actually mother and son, a visual disparity
that the film lampshades at least once when Elaine mentions having Tom
young. It is a seemingly deliberate obfuscation, and one which is typical
of the adumbral mystery which The Winter Lake proposes
throughout. There is the question of Tom’s conception, along with the
reason why the pair have recently hot footed it to the back of beyond,
plot points which the script deliberately obscures, and this is even
before Tom happens upon a bag of infant bones barely buried in the swamp,
igniting the central mystery in The Winter Lake’s fog of enigmas (a question which is perhaps less deliberately
unanswered is why someone would make such a hash of burying a body so that
a simple townie can happen upon it during a brooding wander in the
woods...).
What is however palpable is the sense of place which Sheerin and co
create. The claustrophobic community, with its rustic violence and
simmering tensions, is convincing. How else to explain why
girl-about-small-town Holly immediately hooks up with the near mute Tom: I
mean, what else is there to do here? True to its Pastoral Gothic genre
framework, the threat of sex is seeped into this landscape: insinuating
urgent, lawless couplings. An early attempt by Holly to seduce Tom sees
her taking a piss on the side of the lane in front of him, to which he is
severely nonplussed: they do things differently in the country.
The great Emma Mackey plays Holly, whose gothicky demeanour, in a
pleasing congruity to the outdoorsy violence and forbidden passions of
The Winter Lake, will apparently see her play Emily Brontë next year. Here, she is part
of a devoted cast who go a long way to anchoring the ambiguous disposition
of the story.
As the film conjures up such an oppressive atmosphere of mistrust, any
fule kno that the sad fate of the baby isn’t simply going to be a case of
a postpartum depressed mother. There has to be a villain, and at least
some sort of payoff to the mystery. The issue is that, despite the
narrative being otherwise as grimly abstruse as the grey skies which weigh
heavily upon the characters, you don’t need a passing familiarity with
Gothic and its thematic interest of incest to figure out what is afoot...
Despite the shallowness of the story, and murky waters of the plot, within
The Winter Lake there is still an abundance of quality. The
performers commit to the vagaries of the situation, and the style is
substantially desolate; perhaps not a deep dive, but the above attributes
make this a lake worth a skim.
The Winter Lake is on UK/ROI VOD
from March 15th.
