Surge

Since ear­ly notices fol­low­ing its world pre­mière at Sun­dance 2020, Surge – the first fea­ture from direc­tor Aneil Karia – has been labelled a British equiv­a­lent to Falling Down, Joel Schumacher’s 1993 thriller in which a dis­grun­tled guy vio­lent­ly lash­es out against ​“soci­ety”.

It’s not a total­ly unfair com­par­i­son, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en that the bulk of the break­down nar­ra­tives and crime sprees in both films take place over the course of a sin­gle day. But there are some cru­cial dif­fer­ences. Surge isn’t an espe­cial­ly reac­tionary work in terms of sign­post­ing dia­logue, and the crim­i­nal activ­i­ties it con­cerns are rob­beries and street beat­ings rather than a mur­der­ous ram­page. Most cru­cial­ly, Falling Down is built around Michael Dou­glas, who had estab­lished form in play­ing men prone to psy­chot­ic outbursts.

That’s not the case for the star of Surge, Ben Whishaw, who Karia pre­vi­ous­ly direct­ed in the 2013 short Beat. Whishaw’s break­through lead­ing role was admit­ted­ly as an olfac­to­ri­ly-dri­ven killer in 2006’s Per­fume: The Sto­ry of a Mur­der­er, but the star per­sona he has devel­oped since has tend­ed to con­cern reserved or even over­whelm­ing­ly polite indi­vid­u­als, one of them a friend­ly lit­tle bear in a duf­fel coat. Tak­ing place in an alto­geth­er harsh­er ver­sion of Lon­don, Surge is in fact the anti-Paddington.

Karia spends a lit­tle bit of time estab­lish­ing the protagonist’s sta­tus before his 24-hour odyssey begins. Whishaw’s Joseph leads a lone­ly, mun­dane life, work­ing as a Stanst­ed air­port secu­ri­ty guard among col­leagues who bare­ly acknowl­edge his exis­tence. His emo­tion­al­ly dis­tant par­ents, mean­while, are on edge in his pres­ence. Prone to chomp­ing on glass when he drinks, he ends up break­ing one in his mouth at a fam­i­ly din­ner. He dis­re­gards his mother’s demands, flees with a blood­ied mouth and refus­es to vis­it the hospital.

He goes to work the next day and acts out towards air­port staff and trav­ellers, spit­ting blood on the floor and get­ting boot­ed off his shift. Return­ing to cen­tral Lon­don in a state of per­pet­u­al twitch­ing and uncom­fort­able grin­ning, he latch­es on to the idea of vis­it­ing and assist­ing an off-sick col­league. From there, for rea­sons that only make sense to Joseph, come a series of impromp­tu rob­beries and con­fronta­tions across the city, lead­ing to a manhunt.

The screen­play and direc­tion are delib­er­ate­ly vague in terms of attribut­ing clear caus­es for Joseph’s break­down. One third-act con­ver­sa­tion sug­gests a pos­si­ble his­to­ry of inad­e­quate­ly treat­ed men­tal ill­ness, but it’s nev­er explic­it. The sound design is a rack­et of roar­ing sirens and street traf­fic that reflects the chaos of Joseph’s rapid collapse.

How he is cap­tured aims for a sim­i­lar vis­cer­al con­nec­tion, but while var­i­ous unbro­ken takes are impres­sive on a tech­ni­cal lev­el, the bounc­ing cam­era is bare­ly able to keep up with Whishaw’s wild ges­tic­u­la­tions, and it ulti­mate­ly proves more dis­tanc­ing than inti­mate. In spite of the effec­tive sound­scapes and Whishaw’s valiant efforts, it’s made dif­fi­cult to feel tru­ly present in Joseph’s head­space at all.