Radi­a­tor

Had, in some wack­adoo alter­na­tive uni­verse, Yasu­jiro Ozu direct­ed a remake of With­nail & I, it might have looked a tiny bit like this impres­sive auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal debut fea­ture from Tom Browne. Radi­a­tor sees Daniel (Daniel Cerqueira), a mild-man­nered teacher from Lon­don, hav­ing to briefly decamp to Pen­rith to stay over with his daffy, screw-loose par­ents. Father Leonard (Richard John­son) stub­born­ly barks order from a grub­by sofa and wal­lows in a pit of his own filth. Mean­while his dot­ing door­mat wife, Maria (Gem­ma Jones), cheer­i­ly tends to his every eccen­tric whim.

What Daniel quick­ly dis­cov­ers is that they are a cou­ple out of time, and their rela­tion­ship has cal­ci­fied into a destruc­tive régime of des­per­ate paci­fi­ca­tion. Time expend­ed on retain­ing some small sem­blance of hap­pi­ness has meant that domes­tic chores have fall­en by the way­side, and the pair’s ram­shackle cot­tage is start­ing to resem­ble a junkie’s squat. Rats are the only liv­ing guests, enter­ing through holes in the floor­boards which the cou­ple don’t want to block up as it helps keep out the damp.

There’s no real nar­ra­tive here, just a num­ber of extend­ed scenes in which the bemused and pas­sive Daniel attempts to ease his par­ents towards the end of their lives with­out rock­ing the boat too much. He sees no point in enforc­ing change, unlike when he is able to gen­tly con­di­tion pre-teens when teach­ing them to read. It’s inter­est­ing that he choos­es not to save them, refus­ing to tidy up their hov­el despite com­plaints from the neigh­bours and a gen­er­al hin­drance of their per­son­al wellbeing.

He wants them to live how they’ve evi­dent­ly enjoyed liv­ing, and if he can accom­pa­ny them for a while through their twi­light years, then so be it. What he does see, how­ev­er, is the beast­ly side to his father which has pos­si­bly been exac­er­bat­ed by the onset of demen­tia. Though there are vague hints that their rela­tion­ship was at one time more equal, Leonard now treats Maria as his slave. And she relents. His own phys­i­cal help­less­ness has meant that she has had to cut off all ties with friends, yet she still exe­cutes his every order with a smile and a skip in her step.

Browne opts for very dark obser­va­tion­al humour rather than cheap­en­ing the mate­r­i­al with com­ic set-pieces and obvi­ous jokes. There’s some­thing amus­ing about Leonard moan­ing that Maria has acci­den­tal­ly bought straws with ​“cor­ru­gat­ed necks”, a descrip­tion which coun­ter­points his edu­ca­tion and world­li­ness against the utter pet­ti­ness of the com­plaint. Though sen­si­tive to a fault, the film does touch on all the bases you expect it to, includ­ing the dour con­clu­sion it even­tu­al­ly arrives at. Plus, you do feel that Browne has cre­at­ed two remark­able char­ac­ters in Leonard and Maria, and maybe didn’t have any­thing left in the tank to do any­thing too inter­est­ing for well-mean­ing dullard Daniel.

He drifts through the film as a sad sack observ­er, entire­ly aware of the futil­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion but think­ing fast to try and make the best out of it. Yet as an alle­go­ry for the age­ing process, the destruc­tion of the body and a nat­ur­al drift towards lone­li­ness in lat­er life, it’s a touch­ing and well mount­ed work. Browne is not afraid to hold on to a take, and he nev­er wal­lows on suf­fer­ing as a means to force undue dra­ma. He some­times brave­ly opts to hide the Big Moments between edits.