This brilliant and bizarre film from director Kris Smith is superbly acted and icily controlled – it grips from the very first scenes. Development does not get more arrested than this. I was reminded of Alan Bennett's maxim that all families have a secret: they are not like other families. But I can't imagine any family being quite as unlike others as this.
Set Me Free has a sense of pitch-black humour and even playfulness. Lauren not understanding certain things and getting words in the wrong order (due to her unusual upbringing) can't help make you feel like it's somewhat humorous. The humour is not entirely cruel, or alienated. At one stage, there's a scene between Lauren and Ethan and she starts to understand that life isn't so dangerous and there's more to life than being indoors all the time. On a serious note, I just love how the story leads to something bigger as the minute she leaves the lighthouse. It becomes more than just a strange movie and unfolds into a detective thriller - something I did not expect.
The film is superbly shot, with some deadpan, elegant compositions, and intentionally skewiff framings of the "headless" variety that Lucrecia Martel used in her film The Headless Woman, imbibing both the sociopathy of the characters and, at one remove, the reality-TV surveillance aesthetic of the Big Brother house. Smith holds your attention with wonderfully inscrutable images, such as the lingering opening drone shot.
It is a film about the essential strangeness of something society insists is the benchmark of normality: the family, a walled city state with its own autocratic rule and untellable secrets of what's truly outside.
