Jel­ly­fish

Mar­gate is being descend­ed by frou-frou jack­als from the City, on the prowl for cheapo prop­er­ty they can snaf­fle up, ren­o­vate and then sell on for a mint. The work­ing class pop­u­la­tion of this salty sea­side burg are on last orders, and James Gardner’s Jel­ly­fish sug­gests they must inno­vate in order to survive.

Tac­i­turn, friend­less high-school­er Sarah (Liv Hill) jug­gles between car­ing for two younger sib­lings, fill­ing in for a dead­beat moth­er, earn­ing pock­et change at a games arcade and putting in a shift at school when she can. As long as the equi­lib­ri­um remains per­fect­ly set­tled, her dai­ly ordeal is just about bear­able, with occa­sion­al income sup­ple­ments com­ing from admin­is­ter­ing hand­jobs down a back alley to bald­ing greasers.

Run­ning in tan­dem with all of this is her dra­ma class­es which she attends under chron­ic duress – how can she be wast­ing her time on such frip­pery when the wolf is scratch­ing at the door? Yet her teacher – who is one of those clas­sic movie teach­ers who only sees promise in her vile scorn – thinks she has what it takes to be a stand-up come­di­an. And so he sets her on a course for blue zingers, bad puns, colour­ful invec­tive and tell-it-like-it-is hellfire.

It’s an ambi­tious propo­si­tion, as Gard­ner attempts to fuse a sto­ry about real­is­ing your per­form­ing arts dreams to a rather unsight­ly kitchen sink. Yet the whole thing starts to back­fire fair­ly swift­ly, and when you essen­tial­ly have a train­ing mon­tage which involves smash­ing through a YouTube playlist of Frankie Boyle out­akes, then it’s def­i­nite­ly time to reach for the shepherd’s crook.

Hill has a mighty crack at what is essen­tial­ly a duel role: one of har­ried daugh­ter and the oth­er an appar­ent unsung com­e­dy genius. Where she excels at the for­mer, she dies a death as the lat­ter. The stand-up ele­ment almost comes across as an awk­ward after­thought, or an easy way to build unearned dra­ma, and her light­en­ing-quick ascen­dan­cy to Margate’s own Joan Rivers serves to seri­ous­ly under­mine the film’s real­ist credentials.

Sinead Matthews as man­ic depres­sive moth­er Karen some­times makes for a more com­pelling and dra­mat­i­cal­ly com­bustible pres­ence. Her per­for­mance chan­nels years of dam­age, abuse and hard luck, and it sel­dom leans on unnec­es­sary expo­si­tion to fill in the blanks. Her attempts at moth­er­ing are piti­ful, as it’s patent­ly clear she’s been men­tal­ly absent for most of the last 10 years. Her rela­tion­ship with Sarah, and the way they attempt to sub­tly manip­u­late and under­mine one anoth­er, is the film’s sav­ing grace.