Bait

Mark Jenkin's fifth feature is an experimental drama filmed on 16mm stock using a wind-up Bolex camera, natural light and post-synchronised sound. At the heart of the deceptively simple story is a Cornish fisherman (Edward Rowe) who not only resents the fact that his brother (Giles King) is using their father's old boat to take tourists on day trips, but also despises the smugly bourgeois outsiders (Simon Shepherd, Mary Woodvine) who have turned the family home into a kitschy B&B. A droll subplot forms around King's son (Isaac Woodvine), a waspish barmaid (Chloe Endean), and the interlopers' spoilt teenagers (Georgia Ellery and Jowan Jacobs) but, while the points about gentrification and the commercialisation of British heritage are cogently made, it's the aesthetic audacity of this bid to revive stagnating social realist tropes that makes it so thrillingly significant. Made according to the tenets of Jenkin's own 2012 Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13 manifesto, the final result resembles Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran (1934) or Luchino Visconti's La terra trema (1948) being remade in a pastiched mash-up of the styles of Guy Maddin and Ben Rivers.