Elec­tric­i­ty

Lily is a young woman work­ing as a casi­no cashier in a north­ern sea­side town. ​“I took the ini­tia­tive,” says a hand­some chap who wants to know her name. ​“I took your mon­ey,” she returns. It’s flir­ta­tious ban­ter. A scrap of paper with his num­ber caus­es a look of roman­tic hap­pi­ness. Prepar­ing to meet him lat­er, she slips into a shim­mer­ing blue minidress and pops a whole bunch of pills. Is this an addic­tion film? The dreamy tone and com­po­sure of Lily make it seem oth­er­wise. The pills are for her epilepsy.

With the excep­tion of a debut that didn’t make too much noise, Bryn Hig­gins is a TV direc­tor with cred­its on Casu­al­ty 1909 and Black Mir­ror to his name. For Elec­tric­i­ty, he steps it up a gear, play­ing with light, par­tic­u­lar­ly the way it blurs and caus­es shapes to come in and out of focus. As Lily talks about the elec­tri­cal storms in her brain, the screen lights up with explod­ing synaps­es. He toys with sound too, so we hear the exag­ger­at­ed slow­ness of Lily’s breath­ing as she tries to stay calm, nar­rat­ing author Ray Robinson’s fas­ci­nat­ing prose and telling us that she’s, ​“Alice falling down the rab­bit hole,” just before a con­vul­sion replaces date night with a trip to the hospital.

This is not (quite) a Plucky Ill Fat­ed Female Lives Her Life To The Max movie in the vein of The Fault in Our Stars or Now is Good. For one, Lily is not dying; she is liv­ing with a neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­or­der which caus­es sen­so­ry dis­tur­bances. For two, key rela­tion­ships are not with a blos­som­ing love inter­est. Two broth­ers and two friends — one old, one new — are her dri­ving force. Espe­cial­ly one long-lost broth­er, Mikey (Chris­t­ian Cooke). The death of Lily’s estranged moth­er pro­vides the cat­a­lyst for her to attempt to track him down osten­si­bly to give him a cut of mon­ey but it’s clear that he’s nev­er stopped being her biggest love.

Mod­el-turned-actress Agy­ness Deyn is as mes­meris­ing as all the coloured lights danc­ing. Impos­si­bly tall, slen­der and with a face that looks dif­fer­ent from her every angle, she has a sense of ​‘oth­er­ness’ that suits a char­ac­ter sad­dled with an unusu­al con­di­tion. But although Hig­gins explores the mys­ter­ies of epilep­sy with an artis­tic hand, he is not fetishis­ing it. Lily always aris­es from her hip­py spi­ral bleed­ing and bruised. Deyn’s broad north­ern accent and brisk dia­logue plant her alien beau­ty in the real world, even as bold cos­tume design chan­nel her pre­vi­ous career and enter­tain the eye.

Deyn is eas­i­ly the most com­pelling ele­ment of this curi­ous odyssey. The voice of Ray Robin­son and his source nov­el sits beau­ti­ful­ly in her per­for­mance. Actu­al events: com­ing to Lon­don to find Mikey, strik­ing up a friend­ship with a kind-heart­ed stranger, get­ting robbed by a super-uncon­vinc­ing home­less per­son are not where the stakes of this film are mount­ed. We are wired into Lily’s brain and her poet­ic strug­gles to live seri­ous­ly while at the mer­cy of unpre­dictable insides.