TIFF 2013 Review: Southcliffe (2013)

Cast: Rory Kinnear, Sean Harris, Shirley Henderson
Director: Sean Durkin
Country: UK
Genre: Drama
Official Website: Here

Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage of the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. For more information on the festival visit http://tiff.net and follow TIFF on Twitter at @TIFF_NET.

“So there’s no actual cliff in Southcliffe?” is the question innocently posed to break an awkward in-transit silence as a reporter and his young assistant, sent to investigate a series of shootings, hurtle down the road toward the fictional town from which this new British drama miniseries takes its name. It’s a throwaway comment, seemingly as much a filler in the series itself as in the conversation, yet one that belies the reality that—of course—there is a cliff: that from which the local community falls to the extremist individuality below. It’s the downward plunge from that particular precipice that’s detailed with meticulous, painstaking craft by Martha Marcy May Marlene director Sean Durkin, here making a follow-up to that formidable debut that’s as oddly fitting as it is utterly unexpected.

Durkin follows a long line of high-profile film directors making a first foray into television, and while TIFF may present Southcliffe in one solid block as though it were but a 190-minute feature, it’s a work very much beholden to its form and the slow revelations and subtle nuances of character weekly television broadcast allows, demands even.

Durkin follows a long line of high-profile film directors making a first foray into television, and while TIFF may present Southcliffe in one solid block as though it were but a 190-minute feature, it’s a work very much beholden to its form and the slow revelations and subtle nuances of character weekly television broadcast allows, demands even. That’s primarily thanks to writer Tony Grisoni of Red Riding fame, whose plentiful TV experience sees his script(s) cast in the mould of long-form storytelling, given that slow-build structure best experienced with a week of waiting between instalments, with tensions given time to boil to the surface. For a narrative centred on something as rapid as a rifle’s rattle, Southcliffe is drama as calm and calculated as a game of chess.

That’s not to imply any sense of dispassion; this is a story, and a telling, as empathic and humane as they come. Grisoni and Durkin’s approach finds its firmest statement of intent, fittingly, in the opening scene, where establishing shots of the fog-shrouded town at dawn give way to a happily gardening woman, soon looking around in a daze for the source of the gaping wound in her abdomen. It’s as surreal a moment for the viewer as for her: we’ve known this “sleepy market town”—a term that will be used repeatedly in the three hours to come—but a moment, yet already it’s clear that shootings just don’t happen here. It’s telling that the woman’s face is filled not with pain, but rather sheer shock, as though overcome less with agony than awe. “How could this happen?” her expression seems to ask with a genuine sense of cluelessness that’s shared, every step of the way, by the drama that follows.

That’s drama extraordinarily enacted by a cast whose performances carry a naturalistic simplicity that masks the emotional complexity on which their work is founded. None are better than Eddie Marsan and Shirley Henderson, who—as a troubled couple whose teenage daughter is among the casualties of this tragedy—deliver work typical of the lofty heights both their careers have called home. Marsan’s dazed expression is that of a man whose grief has put him on autopilot; his harrowingly vacant smile as he speaks to his child, laid bare on an autopsy table, is a far more horrifying sight that any of the actual murders to which we bear witness. Henderson, her notoriously shrill voice here an extension of the forced isolation her character feels from the world, is more convincingly ghostly here than in any of the Harry Potter films.

That’s drama extraordinarily enacted by a cast whose performances carry a naturalistic simplicity that masks the emotional complexity on which their work is founded.

“Ghostly” is an apt term for the atmosphere enacted by Durkin’s direction, which brings an almost Gothic feel to the omnipresent fog in which the community is smothered. It’s this fog from which the shooter, and all he and his actions represent, emerges; it’s this fog that visually manifests the distance that grows between individuality and community; it’s this fog that doubtlessly fills the shipping forecast, that old British radio institution whose spoken introduction variously accompanies the beginnings and ends of these episodes. How fitting a bookend it makes, this attempt to impose some modicum of order on something as unpredictable, as uncontrollable, as the sea. Like the people in Southcliffe, like the reporter who slowly becomes its focus, desperately trying to find the signs that went unread, it is but a deceptively calm voice at the mercy of wild, uncaring tides.

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Ronan Doyle

Director of Movies On Demand & Sr. Staff Film Critic at Next Projection

Ronan Doyle is an Irish undergraduate film student and freelance critic, whose work has appeared on Indiewire, FilmLinc, Film Ireland, FRED Film Radio, and otherwhere. When not watching movies, reading about movies, writing about movies, or thinking about movies, he can be found talking about movies on Twitter. He is fuelled by tea and has heard of sleep, but finds the idea frightfully silly.

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