Is it even done to talk about Tony Scott's first film? He made Loving Memory 13 years before The Hunger with BFI money (reportedly some Albert Finney money as well), it was shown at Cannes, and then the younger Scott didn't direct a film for more than a decade when he came out with fairly different material. At only 50 minutes in length, it's a curious mood piece and not much else, and I was mostly just kind of bored.
A young man (David Pugh) is riding his bicycle around the rural part of Northern York when he's accidentally hit by a car driven by Ambrose (Roy Evans) and his sister (Rosamund Greenwood). He's immediately killed in the impact, and Ambrose and his sister pack him up in the car and take him to their remote house.
The next forty minutes or so is Ambrose's sister talking sweetly and kindly to the corpse of the young man, cleaning him up, changing his clothes, and talking about James, a young man who may have been their son (honestly, it's not clear at all). It happens at the same time that Ambrose is out gathering wood using his mining truck (the mine never really has any importance other than some regional flavor, I think), and setting up some small explosions for his mine.
The only real material thing that happens across this half-hour is a breeding sense of unease as Ambrose's sister keeps talking in that nice, old lady from the North sort of way, steadily revealing their past in cryptic terms. Really, I'm not sure if James was their kid or their brother. Anyway, none of the detail that does get through is terribly interesting, and nothing of terrible interest actually happens. The only real positive it has for it is that steady progression of tone towards unease. It's a small win, but it's still a win.
Maybe if the young man were still alive but slowly dying it might have worked a bit better, but him already being dead places any actual tension purely on Ambrose and his sister potentially getting caught, which is never a thing in the film. There's no shot of neighbors wondering what's going on. There's no moment where a police officer comes by with information about a car matching their description having been involved in an accident. It's just this steady, quiet conversation between Ambrose's sister and a dead man where the dead man says nothing.
And, it's just not very much to latch onto. There's no great twist coming, even, to recast everything. It's really just kind of a quiet muddle with no real point and nothing to grip the audience beyond this light sense of steadily growing unease. That's not nothing, but it's also not a whole lot.
Maybe if it were more...stylish?
