I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning – first-look review

In the UK since 1981, over 2.8 million social housing properties have been lost through privatisation and demolition. Every election cycle a swath of candidates make vows about investment in the most deprived areas of the country, providing jobs and homes for those who need them most, yet many of these promises fail to materialise. Birmingham-raised novelist Keiran Goddard examined the difficulties of the generation born since Thatcher in his 2025 novel ​‘I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning’, following a group of friends in their late 20s who are faced to reckon with the harsh realities of a system that’s stacked against them, now adapted for the screen by Clio Barnard.

Patrick (Anthony Boyle), Rian (Joe Cole), Oli (Jay Lycurgo), Conor (Daryl McCormack) and Shiv (Lola Petticrew) have been a solid unit of five since childhood, maintaining their friendships through school, university and the diverging paths their lives have taken in the interim. Patrick and Shiv have started a family; Rian’s made good as a London banker; Conor’s following in his father’s footsteps by taking on an ambitious housing project; and Oli…well, Oli’s pretty much the same as he was as a teenager, still partying and dealing drugs in lieu of a proper job.

Barnard and Walsh’s screenplay meets the group just after Oli’s 30^th birthday, when life changes rapidly call into question previously unshakable bonds. Despite his uni degree and evident brains Patrick’s stuck barely making ends meet with gruelling shifts on a gig economy app, while Rian’s caught between the world he grew up in and the one he’s assimilated to, where he’s treated as a novelty by his rich girlfriend. Despite the relatively large ensemble, the film manages to balance the screen time so that every character is allowed their own arc – there’s a rich chemistry between the group, though Boyle, Lycurgo and McCormack emerge as the stand-outs, portraying different aspects of modern masculinity thoughtfully, from Patrick’s frustrated philosophising to Oli’s sudden revelations about his source of income, and Conor’s struggle with alcoholism and anger issues.

Yet I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning isn’t a relentlessly sombre affair. The group experience hardships, but there’s also a lot of joy too, from Oli adopting a stray dog to the birth of Conor’s daughter. The reality is, when you’re working class your moments of respite and happiness are often stolen away by contending pressures, and Barnard captures this contradiction without belabouring the point. Similarly the film displays the intricacies of male friendships with a real tenderness, highlighting that the communities we build for ourselves have the power to give us what society-at-large won’t.

While Barnard herself didn’t grow up in a working class household, she has shown over the years the capacity to communicate these experiences without leering sensationalism, from The Arbor to Ali & Ava. Her fifth feature film is a continuation of this, and while undoubtedly it would be preferable to have working class filmmakers being supported to tell our own stories rather than relying on community outsiders, there is a sense that Barnard is determined to not be a tourist in these spaces; I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning follows in the tradition of socio-realistic filmmaking, and like the best of those films, avoids portraying working class life as unrelentingly miserable while not shying away from the hardships that come with an increasingly precarious existence. Barnard’s film is full of warmth for its characters but also articulates salient points about a world that was promised to a generation if they did everything right, only to discover in adulthood that never existed to begin with.