Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Mikey Murray
Starring: Eilis Cahill, Steve Oram, Peter Bankolé, Julia Deakin, Jason Isaacs
As a lapsed cineaste, I used to wish that my life was in black and white.
Imagine! The silvered mise-en-scene of existence automatically rendered
more glamourous and more serious, with even the most mundane interactions
lent a patina of monochrome charm. It would make what is mainly quite
routine and unremarkable at least visually interesting. Nowadays, it would
be useful, too, if my life had a black and white simplicity in terms of
human relations; the interpersonal exchanges and emotional experiences
which make up life. Take the couple at the centre of Mikey Murray's
Mind-Set, which is shot in indie B&W: the honeymoon period is long gone, and
both are not only contending with strains of pernicious mental illness but
also the intimidating stretch of The Rest Of Their Lives Together, a
boundless period characterised by tedious complications of loyalty, the
loss (almost like grief, I would imagine) of the person you initially fell
for, and just a crushing drill of shared existence holding the whole thing
together. Talk about shades of grey.
But not in the modern sense of the idiom. In Mind-Set the
sex has faded to a particularly ashen hue as we open with a cringe
mandating quasi-sex scene of abortive coupling, characterised by habit and
relief rather than lust and urgent desire. Lucy (Eilis Cahill)
wanks off Paul (Steve Oram) with the same grimly aggressive
determination with which you or I would attempt to unblock a sink.
Masturbating someone else is hard work at the best of times, and Cahill's
thousand-yard stare illustrates that the sheen has long since fallen off
this relationship. In these opening moments, Cahill and Oram adeptly
establish a relationship recognisably lived in and dog eared with
contemptuous familiarity.
Through dreamy flashbacks to a horse in a field, which is filmed in the
stuttering saturated dyes of 8mm (hmmm) we know that Lucy longs for
escape, a desire infused with nostalgia as her present, working in An
Office as a resting actor, is colourless AF. Paul isn't much to come home
too, either, where he exists in a perpetual state of stasis as an
agoraphobe working on an unlikely screenplay. Oram continues here to
perfect his persona as a variably threatening, socially repulsive slob
with an achingly human heart beneath; we see him demonstrating the
relative benefits of a bidet to an aghast group of guests, along with the
pass-agg relationship he enjoys with the Amazon delivery guy, but then
sweetly making dinner later for Lucy when she returns from boring work.
The tile refers to Lucy and Paul's respective psychologies, but also the
stagnancy of their lives. Paul orders Lucy a tennis racket - she used to
play when she was a kid - but, of course, not another for himself as he
can't step out of the door: Mind, Set, but no Match. No wonder Lucy is
drawn to the office newbie with his squash player physique (Daniel -
Peter Bankolé). In keeping with the unflinching sexual
representation of the opening, their ensuing affair is defined by
clumsiness and disappointment, which I always imagine would be the
ultimate experience of such transgressions (people in unfulfilled
relationships who embark on such things must have very desperate hopes for
whatever they imagine they'll find at the bottom/end of the illicitly
offered genitals).
Central to the film is Cahill's performance, and she is magnetic in her
awkward physicality and star struck beauty (how she looks is "text", her
thin frame pointedly referred to in the film) with her captivating
ethereality duly contrasted by Oram's whimsical meatiness. The soured
chemistry of Lucy and Paul powers Mind-Set, which is otherwise almost too successful in its moribund familiarity of
a dead-end relationship. The film eventually finds itself in a bit of a
cul-de-sac and finishes with a melodramatic denouement which feels less a
brutaliser of an ending and more like an unforced error.
Mind-Set is in UK cinemas and on
VOD from October 6th.
