New perspectives are exciting, even more so when they arrive on our screens in the medium of a moving picture. The film festival exists for this very reason, giving space to explore even the oldest of tropes with fresh direction, talent and stories.
This year’s London Film Festival was the first for three burgeoning directors. Little unites the work of Jesse Eisenberg, Malcolm Washington and Christopher Andrews in space, time or subject matter, but each of their films at LFF this year has created a similar, quiet sort of realness that explores just how the weight of the past bears down on the present. These were ordinary stories about everyday people, united in their exploration of generational trauma and how it affects the psyche, provokes the paranormal and sometimes erupts in violence.
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Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is a road movie that follows cousins Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Jesse Eisenberg) on a tour of Poland, undertaken to honour both their Jewish heritage and their recently deceased grandmother. The pair are polar opposites: Benji navigates the world with a carefreeness that is both charming and jarring, while David possesses a tense stoicness that seems to weigh him down.
But as their trip progresses, Benji falls apart. He tries his best to decline any proper engagement with the facts and figures of the Holocaust, and when he does, it results in chaotic, tearful outbursts. The weight of confronting the loss of his grandmother whilst surrounded by the collective pain of his people leaves Benji teetering on an unpredictable edge that, David explains, previously pushed him to take his own life. A Real Pain portrays just two ways in which grief can influence the psyche. In the face of their trauma, David carries all of the resilience, while Benji seems to carry all of the pain.
Just as David and Benji handle their grief differently, so too do the siblings of Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson. In 1911 Pittsburgh, Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) and Boy Willie (John David Washington) are at odds over the fate of their heirloom piano. For Boy Willie, selling it means he can reclaim the land that their ancestors once worked as slaves, but Berniece refuses to let go. She clings to the piano, captured by the carved face of their enslaved mother that gleams in the piano’s ebony wood.
In The Piano Lesson, the effects of this ancestral grief manifest themselves as a paranormal haunting. The ghost of the family’s slave master wanders the halls of their home, entrapped by Berniece’s double act of clinging to the past, while refusing to look it in the eye. The apparitions arrive as a chaotic force that physically pushes Berniece towards the future. Only when she takes a seat at the piano does the haunting cease. The pain remains, as it always will, but the tension shatters and the anger dissipates in a way that only letting go can bring.
There is no such satisfactory release in Bring Them Down. Michael O’Shea (Christopher Abbott) is the sole tender of his disabled father’s sheep farm in the hills of rural Ireland. They are at odds with the neighbouring Keeley family, tethered by a tragic car accident that killed Michael’s mother and scarred Jack Keeley’s mother Caroline. But when Jack (Barry Keoghan) steals two prize rams from their shared mountaintop, tensions come to a head, and before long there’s bloodshed.
Bring Them Down is laced with a collective trauma that explodes into episodes of brutal, male violence. Jack ponders a life outside the farm that he might never see, and Michael is no more than a sullen soldier serving his father’s whims. Both sons are trapped by the weight of their families’ livelihoods – the farms – and when things go wrong, both turn to violence in panicked desperation.
So much of this film echoes an Ireland of past and present; the clipped sentences between Michael and his dad, often spoken as Gaeilge (in Irish); the Tayto crisps and Barry’s Tea bags piled high on the counter; and the terse code of silence that echoes the ancestral Irish quality of looking the other way. It’s a tragic representation of generational trauma that mirrors the classic consequences of rigid Irish masculinity and male aggression.
Though distinct from one another, these portrayals of grief find root in a universal truth; trauma trickles down the family line, and it persists. There are no easy solutions offered here. These films force the viewer to confront the rawness of the human experience, serving as a reminder that healing is a process with no clean-cut end. Yet, through Benji’s vulnerability, the reconnection of the Charles-Doaker family and the desire to break cycles of violence in Bring Them Down, a subtle invitation to move forward is offered. We must take it, even if it hurts.
