Suffering from unspecified discrimination in an urban environment and avoiding contact with her husband, a woman of mixed ethnicity walks out of her house and there is an instant shift to "years later" and a glaringly wealthy small village, where she is now ensconced in a large house with a white husband, teenage kids and a job as the deputy head of a public school. She has adopted a home counties accent, wears wigs to appear straight-haired and talks with the faux empathy of a Tory politician, even to her children. She is in utter denial of her background and as the story progresses it becomes clear that we're dealing with not just a choice, but a mental illness. This is rapidly aggravated when a young black man and woman turn up in the village, befriending her children, For a while this works as a thriller as their motives are kept clouded and the director gets to make some astute points about racial identity and social status too. But then it shows through that Martello-White is an actor directing his first feature, with an inadequate sense of discipline when it comes to structure: the thriller and sociopolitical elements ultimately get in each other's way, the final act becoming unhelpfully reminiscent of Haneke's Funny Games. It does also have to be pointed out that it shoots itself in the foot with the casting alone: why has a black director decided to employ the one-drop rule, thereby making the relationships presented completely implausible, particularly when the film explicitly deals with race as a subject matter?
There are glimpses of promise here, particularly in the unconventional visual style and observations of telling details, but the overall result is frustrating.
4/10
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