Anticipation.
We were big fans of Polak’s previous feature, Dirty God.
Enjoyment.
It deals with tough questions and tough situations, but the quality is undeniable.
In Retrospect.
A messy film, but in a very lifelike and truthful way. Knight and Creed-Miles are amazing.
Two minutes into Dutch filmmaker Sacha Polak’s fourth feature, Silver Haze, and the film that instantly springs to mind is Gary Oldman’s Nil By Mouth: the fondly recreated working-class milieu of a Dagenham housing estate; the overlapping dialogue from a multi-directional front-room confab; the sudden bursts of violent invective and the sense that the familial harmony we’re witnessing in this moment will be short-lived.
The film stars Vicky Knight, extraordinary as the brooding, disconsolate day nurse, caring for her mentally ill mother and on a mission to track down her estranged father in order to discover why, as a child, she was left in a burning pub and now bares the scars of that fateful night. A spark is formed with flighty out-patient Florence (Esme Creed-Miles) who lives in a commune in Southend with a malformed family of lost souls, and Vicky is invited over to tend to her wounds.
Get more Little White Lies
Yet this is no simple tale of love’s constellations offering a shroud for all the darkness and depression, more an expression of how this budding relationship brings with it a whole raft of additional trials and traumas. Silver Haze is a hacked-away crosscut of life on the social fringes, a Molotov soap opera powered by committed performances and containing characters who are, to a man, sculpted with genuine depth and humanity.
Little White Lies is committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.
