Bridgend

If you live in the back of beyond, where all your parents and grandparents knew each other how do you escape? What is there to live for when there are no jobs or future to look forward to? How do you portray this scenario in a film? Welcome to Bridgend. A dark and melancholic film that does just that. Everything is dark, the scenery, soundtrack and outlook give no hope. The teenagers are falling by the wayside, one by one and still no one has any answers. You feel their angst and inevitable demise but it all seems natural. The sign of a good film in my eyes and ears. Not for everyone, a bleak tale if ever there was one but well portrayed non the less.

Such an intense movie with so much hard, darkness and yet it's beautiful in a way that is hard to describe. This movie got under my skin. It is highly recommended.

Bridgend attempts to explore a deeply unsettling real-life tragedy, but despite its eerie atmosphere and strong cinematography, the film struggles to deliver a coherent or impactful narrative. The misty, bleak landscapes perfectly set the tone, and there's an undeniable sense of dread throughout. However, the storytelling feels vague and frustratingly elusive, failing to provide meaningful insight into the tragic events it depicts.

Hannah Murray delivers a committed performance, bringing raw emotion to her role, but the film's repetitive nature and lack of depth make it a difficult watch. Instead of diving into the psychological and societal factors behind the story, it leans too much on mood and abstraction, leaving the audience disconnected rather than immersed.

While the film deserves credit for its ambition and visual aesthetic, it ultimately falls short of being a gripping or thought-provoking experience.

There's a documentary made a few years earlier that is way more informative about these events in Bridgend than this really quite messy dramatisation. This really centres around the relationship between the newly arrived "Sara" (Hannah Murray) whose dad "Dave" (Steven Waddington) is a police officer and "Jamie" (Josh O'Connor). The latter lad is a lifer in this town and quite possibly knows something of what has caused the almost lemming-like suicidal activity that is puzzling this small community. Unfortunately, this film chooses not to focus on any aspects of these tragedies, but more to shine it's light on the boozy and thuggish activities of the town's fairly lawless youth - which I have to say, isn't really very interesting. It's got O'Connor in it, so of course there are sex and sexual tensions, but he's nowhere near his best and the remainder of the cast - some of whom are real locals, deliver little more than a angrily scripted critique on a recently arrived family under pressure, some hormonal and cultish messing about in the river and it leaves us none the wiser about the root causes of these deaths nor about the complexities of the grief and, to an extent, the fear felt by those surviving. Perhaps the six years director Jeppe Rønde spent researching the film and acquainting himself with the community immersed him too deeply for him to remain even slightly objective about what he was trying to tell us, and so what we have is left isn't really worth the film, sorry.

This is one of those movies that you quite enjoy watching because the acting is good and you want to find out what's going on vis a vis the compelling and suicide-packed plot. Sadly you never do. It becomes increasingly ludicrous without respite. Shame. I thought it was going somewhere...