The Lev­el­ling

There are no jump cuts, art­ful com­po­si­tions, musi­cal inter­ludes, pop cul­tur­al quo­ta­tions or scenery-chew­ing per­for­mances in Hope Dick­son Leach’s con­tem­po­rary update of ​‘King Lear’, The Lev­el­ling. This is a film that doesn’t need to snag at your coat for atten­tion – it is bril­liant because of the insights it deliv­ers and the con­vinc­ing man­ner it whips up a dev­as­tat­ing fam­i­ly dra­ma from the fog­gy ether.

This is naked, unadorned film­mak­ing that’s only inter­est­ed in hack­ing emo­tions back to the mar­row and mak­ing every­thing that appears with­in the frame count. It’s invig­o­rat­ing to be in the pres­ence of some­one in such con­trol of a film and who clear­ly cares deeply about what view­ers see, hear and feel.

But first, let’s heap praise on Ellie Kendrick’s tow­er­ing cen­tral per­for­mance as prodi­gal daugh­ter Clover. She returns to the fam­i­ly farm to attend the funer­al of her younger broth­er, who shot him­self after an evening of bac­cha­na­lian rev­el­ry. All she does is keeps secrets and hides her feel­ings. And she doesn’t use ges­tures to sig­nal to the cam­era that she’s hid­ing feel­ings – it’s done in a way that, when those feel­ings are actu­al­ly revealed, they’re entire­ly plau­si­ble and surprising.

There are twists to the sto­ry, but they are pow­ered by inte­ri­or rather than exte­ri­or forces. Maybe that slow, stut­ter­ing drip-feed of emo­tions might not seem like such an impres­sive feat, but Kendrick makes it feel nat­ur­al – as if she’s react­ing rather than act­ing. Like the film itself, her per­for­mance is mil­i­tant­ly non-showy, but these still waters run very deep.

Clover’s foil is her mad pops Aubrey (David Troughton) who ini­tial­ly seems like he’s chron­i­cal­ly depressed and going a lit­tle stir crazy. He saw Clover was a safe and stur­dy pair of hands, poten­tial heir to the land and the only one with the where­with­al to car­ry the fam­i­ly ban­ner into the future. But through intim­i­da­tion and a desire for per­son­al inde­pen­dence, she went off to seek her for­tune, and her volatile younger broth­er Char­lie both inher­it­ed and lat­er bought the farm.

The Lev­el­ling is not an exam­ple of a film­mak­er des­per­ate­ly try­ing to make some­thing new or search for new forms of cin­e­mat­ic expres­sion. Leach proves with her minute­ly sculpt­ed, screw-turn­ing tale that there is far too lit­tle val­ue placed on basic com­pe­tence in the won­drous world of movies. She has clear­ly reverse engi­neered every ele­ment of her tale, know­ing how every frame and every ges­ture will impact on and feed into every oth­er. Watch­ing some­one get all the small things right is an unal­loyed joy to behold.

It would be very easy to take this film for grant­ed, but you’d be a fool to do so. It talks about famil­ial break­down and respon­si­bil­i­ty, ghosts and sav­iours, pride and glo­ry with such exper­tise and intel­li­gence that it’s clear Leach has lived these lives and knows these peo­ple. It’s a cliché to say that we can’t wait to see what she does next, but we’d be lying to our­selves if we didn’t say that we real­ly, real­ly can’t wait to see what she goes on to down the line.