Daphne

Lon­don is cur­rent­ly play­ing host to a rash of crimes where young teenagers toss acid in to the face of ran­dom strangers as the pre­lude to a theft. On the news, anchors describe how these attacks result in ​“life-chang­ing” injuries, empha­sis­ing that, in an instant, fate can deal you the bummest of bum hands.

Peter Mack­ie Burns’ soul­ful debut fea­ture Daphne explores a sim­i­lar conun­drum, as it fol­lows a young, sin­gle, bewil­dered woman as she wit­ness­es a stab­bing in an all-night off licence. One moment it’s tip­sy rev­el­ry and bask­ing in the roman­tic glow of twin­kling street lamps, the next it’s the ins­ta-sober­ing moment where you’re clutch­ing a man as he bleeds out on the deck, request­ing to glimpse a grub­by pho­to­graph of his chil­dren before he poten­tial­ly shuf­fles off. How can a per­son just car­ry on regard­less after this shot of high trauma?

This is the kind of frag­ile, high-wire char­ac­ter piece that lives or dies on the strength of its lead per­for­mance, and luck­i­ly Burns has draft­ed in rel­a­tive new­com­er Emi­ly Beecham as the epony­mous hero­ine. Actu­al­ly, ​“hero­ine” isn’t exact­ly the right term to describe Daphne – she’s more of an impetu­ous focal point who, on the wrong side of 30, is locked in a con­stant tailspin.

Her dom­i­nant trait is that she always says yes until you give her just one small rea­son to say no. She’s impul­sive, but only in the com­pa­ny of like-mind­ed souls. Self-doubt and sen­si­ble behav­iour lead to instant rejec­tion, as if she can’t abide the resid­ual respon­si­bil­i­ty of oth­ers. It’s like she can only feel hap­py if she is able to see oth­er peo­ple mak­ing all the same bad deci­sions that she is.

She works in a restau­rant where all the staff wear muslin aprons, but only so she has the cash to go out and get drunk when her shift is over. Smok­ing numbs the pain of her lone­li­ness. She has acquain­tances rather than friends, and human con­tact comes in the form of watch­ful ran­dos, like an amorous bounc­er or the deliv­ery guy of the local Indi­an take­away. Daphne is not a like­able or endear­ing char­ac­ter in any sense – you want to shake some sense into her.

But Beecham works hard to make sure an empa­thet­ic core is vis­i­ble through the mire of con­fu­sion and nar­cis­sism. She’s not a bad per­son, she’s just a lost per­son who’s find­ing it very tough to be good. Her long night of the soul comes after one of her cus­tom­ary drink-ups where a quick nip into a shop for fags leaves her with weep­ing exis­ten­tial scars. Yet this is no con­ven­tion­al epiphany, as it sends Daphne even fur­ther down her fur­row of soli­tude. Her depres­sion has reached a dan­ger­ous low that bor­ders on the nihilistic.

The brood­ing neg­a­tive emo­tions are brought to life by the orig­i­nal and atmos­pher­ic depic­tion of a city that’s anony­mous, mys­te­ri­ous and shorn of icon­ic land­marks. If the film has any issues, it’s that some of the inter­ac­tions err on the syn­thet­ic – they feel too much like visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions of words on a page. There are numer­ous meet cutes that come to noth­ing, and there’s the feel­ing that Burns is try­ing too hard to achieve a free-owing nat­u­ral­ism through care­ful­ly cal­i­brat­ed per­for­mances. But it’s Beecham’s com­bustible, sub­tly alien­at­ing and hope­ful­ly star-mak­ing cen­tral turn that gives this flighty film its wings.