Hin­ter­land

Shot on the des­o­late, beau­ti­ful Cor­nish coast­line for £10,000, British inde­pen­dent film­mak­er Har­ry Macqueen’s debut fea­ture is curios­i­ty-induc­ing with­out being con­vinc­ing. Con­cern­ing a week­end in the life of Har­vey (Mac­queen) and his long-lost friend Lola (Lori Camp­bell), Hin­ter­land drench­es slow-burn char­ac­ter devel­op­ment in depic­tions of nature’s might. It then undoes the good work by hit­ting false notes dur­ing its painstak­ing­ly estab­lished emo­tion­al crescendo.

Har­vey and Lola are the sole char­ac­ters, and the dou­ble mys­tery of who they are and their rela­tion­ship to one anoth­er is sub­tly grip­ping from the moment the for­mer picks up the lat­ter and her gui­tar from a grimy Lon­don hov­el. He dri­ves her to the cot­tage that they used to fre­quent with their fam­i­lies as kids. She is a trav­el­ling musi­cian who has just returned from Amer­i­ca for an unspec­i­fied rea­son that doesn’t seem to bode well.

Camp­bell has a nat­ur­al, free-spir­it­ed ener­gy that com­ple­ments the more tac­i­turn and intro­spec­tive char­ac­ter of Har­vey. He is ini­tial­ly pre­sent­ed as the self­less sav­iour but she returns the favour through the medi­um of fun. Mac­queen lay­ers up his role show­ing a sur­face awk­ward­ness that gives way to enjoy­ment and plea­sure at Lori’s impul­sive sug­ges­tions. Wit­ness horse pho­tog­ra­phy, fish­ing and all man­ner of inno­cent larks expe­ri­enced as sea-wind whips hair and ragged hills tele­graph iso­la­tion. These youth­ful hi-jinx have a grav­i­tas. They are nos­tal­gic diver­sions to mark time as the pair build up the courage to talk about real shit.

Mac­queen played his ace by real­is­ing that he and Camp­bell have an easy on-screen chem­istry. Their rap­port works best when riff­ing over the lit­tle things. The details of the dis­rup­tion that drove Lola back home emerge prompt­ing mutu­al rev­e­la­tions of dis­sat­is­fac­tion with life. These out­bursts sit awk­ward­ly in the char­ac­ters’ mouths feel­ing more like a writer’s struc­tur­al deci­sion of ​‘insert cli­max here’ than organ­ic evo­lu­tions of scenes. This debut shows Macqueen’s capac­i­ty to cap­ture nat­ur­al rhythms in peo­ple and in land­scapes. Where he comes unstuck is in the dis­tract­ing­ly con­trived ele­ments of his filmmaking.