Noc­tur­nal – first look review

Pete (Cos­mo Jarvis) is a 33-year-old painter-dec­o­ra­tor who lives in a sparse apart­ment in the sea­side town where he was born. He is fuck­ing a woman who is increas­ing­ly dis­sat­is­fied with the arrange­ment and is now flirt­ing with a teenag­er at a local school, where he has a paint­ing job. It is here he first sees and becomes trans­fixed by Lau­rie (Lau­ren Coe), 16, who has just moved from Dublin with her moth­er Jean (Sadie Frost) back to the latter’s hometown.

The film’s great­est asset is the hulk­ing force of tra­di­tion­al mas­culin­i­ty that is Cos­mo Jarvis (of Lady Mac­beth fame) who is in almost every scene, usu­al­ly shot in extreme close-up and by a hand­held cam­era that pur­sues him as he lum­bers around like a beast of bur­den. This is a man who strug­gles to say what’s on his mind, hav­ing to sum­mon a huge force of will to even grunt in the right direc­tion of his intend­ed comments.

His pri­ma­ry func­tion to women is his abil­i­ty to phys­i­cal­ly ser­vice them with his big, mus­cu­lar body. This is a type of male char­ac­ter often deployed by cin­e­ma as a threat­en­ing fig­ure, and this default read on his pres­ence spikes the poignant scenes that emerge as we come clos­er to under­stand­ing what gov­erns him in rela­tion to Laurie.

Due to Pete’s notice­able phys­i­cal­i­ty, his habit of skulk­ing around Lau­rie is none too sub­tle. After she clocks him, the two strike up a friend­ship forged in exces­sive alco­hol con­sump­tion. She, hun­gry for expe­ri­ence, attempts to seduce him, while he holds back. What is the motive of this sex­u­al­ly vir­ile man, if not the obvious?

This is Nathalie Biancheri’s first fea­ture and she over­es­ti­mates the intrigue of the ambigu­ous cen­tral dynam­ic. The script, co-writ­ten by Biancheri and Olivia War­ing, strains to drum up an atmos­phere out of hold­ing back Pete’s motives and some sequences often feel under­pow­ered, like we are tread­ing water while wait­ing for the next tid­bit of information.

With the help of cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Michal Dymak, Biancheri pads out the run-time through pret­ty cut­aways to city lights twin­kling through rain-streaked win­dows, and wind tur­bines rotat­ing in the grey skies beside the beach. These thick­ly laid-on aes­thet­ic flour­ish­es cre­ate dis­cord with the con­sen­sus opin­ions expressed by char­ac­ters that the set­ting is a nowheresville that every­one wants to leave. While it’s pos­si­ble to read the deci­sion to fill Noc­tur­nal with pic­turesque shots as an attempt to place it with­in a height­ened, or fairy-tale world, this is not sup­port­ed by the focus on real­ism in all oth­er respects.

At its best, this is a por­trait of flawed, inar­tic­u­late mas­culin­i­ty and the con­found­ing assump­tions that men and women project into each oth­er. Cos­mo Jarvis proves him­self able to car­ry a film on his con­sid­er­able shoul­ders: a lead­ing man who harks back to the beau­ti­ful, sen­si­tive, Bran­do-esque brutes of the 1950s.