Make Up review: this sexy, eerie Cornish creeper is the best British film of 2020 so far
Dir: Claire Oakley; Starring: Molly Windsor, Stefanie Martini, Joseph Quinn, Theo Barklem-Biggs, Lisa Palfrey, Elodie Wilton. 15 cert, 86 mins
This outstanding debut feature from the London-based filmmaker Claire Oakley feels a little like a British reimagining of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire: a sort of Snapshot of a Teenager Soaked to the Skin. Oakley has devised a ripplingly eerie and sensual psychological drama which unfolds in a remote, rain-lashed caravan park on the Cornish coast, where 19-year-old Ruth (a superb Molly Windsor, from the BBC drama Three Girls) finds herself roiled by unfamiliar forces.
A shy and retiring Derby native, Ruth has come south to visit Tom (Joseph Quinn), her boyfriend of three years, who has taken a residential job at the site during the off-season. On her first night, she is unsettled by the shrieks of mating foxes outside their trailer – a sound her boyfriend confidently and wrongly attributes to cubs pining for their mothers.
Meanwhile, a novelty bunny lamp glows on the couple’s bedside table: a fertility totem in moulded PVC. The dunes and pitches here reverberate with certain signs, but they can be all too easily misread.
As Tom goes about his work, Ruth’s mind worries away at two discoveries: a long red hair she finds stuck to an item of her boyfriend’s clothing, and on his mirror, the oily shadow of a lipstick print. Tom isn’t exactly an obvious catch: in one of the most brilliantly specific and damning character details I’ve seen in years, we see him eating spaghetti bolognese in a sandwich.
Nevertheless, Ruth suspects an affair, and starts sensing the presence of a “scarlet woman” figure in the park, watching her from the unoccupied caravans and disappearing around corners in a flash of red nail varnish, somehow always just out of sight, or maybe reach.
Viewers familiar with the weird British seaside of such MR James adaptations as Whistle and I’ll Come to You or A Warning to the Curious – or even the perturbingly fecund bays and inlets of The Wicker Man – will soon recognise the lie of the land here. Make Up isn’t exactly a ghost story in the conventional sense, but it masterfully deploys the cinematic language of hauntings and possessions to explore its young heroine’s oncoming identity crisis.
Oakley, her cinematographer Nick Cooke and editor Sacha Szwarc are brilliantly attuned to the presence of the uncanny in the everyday: this is the kind of film in which two fire buckets clanking gently against a pole in broad daylight, or the arrhythmic beat and flutter of plastic sheeting in the wind, can bring on rapid-onset heebie-jeebies.
As her paranoia builds, Ruth finds a seeming ally in Jade (Stefanie Martini), Tom’s vivacious colleague, who extends an offer of friendship in the form of a manicure and drinks back at her place. “It’s not about what it looks like, it’s how it makes you feel,” Jade reassures her, while gluing elegant acrylic talons to the bitten-down stumps of Ruth’s nails.
At first, the feeling of not quite being herself any more grants Ruth a temporary libido boost. But this is followed by a spasm of self-loathing – and the swerve into body-horror as she tries to hack off these adornments with a kitchen knife feels as if it might slash the film itself to ribbons.
Ruth is wrestling with something too rarely explored in coming-of-age narratives: she is simultaneously obsessed with and repelled by her own burgeoning desires. In the park’s communal shower block, she spies under the door of a stall at two bodies making love, but the clawing and slapping she witnesses looks like a kind of insanity, if indeed it is even taking place outside of her head. It is an extraordinary sequence – lusciously sexy but also utterly unnerving; a mad tangle of teenage fears and cravings given perfect cinematic expression.
As poetically teasing as it is psychologically precise, Make Up signals the arrival of an exciting new talent.
Make Up is in cinemas and on demand from Friday