A spot of venison stew there with white bread minus vegetables. Not the healthiest supper. But Shell is doing her best. She’s her dads chief-cook-cum-carer-cum-surrogate-wife cum sole other person daughter.
A very intense and needy relationship they’ve stewed themselves together in for the last 13 years (since his wife and her mother left them)
He (Joseph Mawle) is a morose epileptic with no friends. She (Chloe Pirrie) is a moody 17 year old teenager with no friends. They’ve only got one another. All the time. To make life suffocatingly bearable and co-dependently co-existable with.
What is making their intense isolation together even more intense, and isolating, is where they live.
Here in this remote garage on top of the Scottish Highlands.
Breathtakingly beautiful it certainly is
But also bone-chillingly bleak.
And very very windy. The winds howls at you from every direction. The wind is constantly in your hair blowing your chilly head off.
‘Whats your name?‘ the girl is asked. ‘Shell‘ she says.
‘Shell like the petrol station’ is the automatic retort.
‘Shell like the unique and beautiful thing you find in the sea’ she says.
The whole dichotomy of the film is contained in that dialogue.
Is she going to stay trapped inside this lonely petrol station existence?
Or will she have the courage to break free of her claustrophobic father-daughter dependency – and go find the unique and beautiful thing contained within her?
She is very needy of her dad. And also her need is becoming confused as something else
Something neither of them really know how to honestly handle or properly deal with.
She’s run down the long road with a dolly a little girl has left behind. Part of her wants to keep running, keep going.
Her dad knows that.
Dad: I thought you’ve left me.
Shell: Did you?
Dad: We’ve been happy here, haven’t we?
Shell: Hmm.
Dad: I still love you.
Shell: I love you too.
Dad: I need you to stay.
Shell: I know.
Dad: Shell needs you too.
Shell: I’m not going anywhere.
They start kissing. And not in a fondly affectionate innocent father daughter way.
He knows he’s gone too far.
He knows he’s got to let her go.
So he does what he does next sort of for her sake (and hopefully eventual salvation)
Releases himself from his bond and bondage (his torment, his depression, his grief) and frees Shell to go her own unique and independent somewhere else way.
He walks out and turns himself into roadkill.
Heartbreaking. But somehow you could see something as tragic as this coming.
This is a film I’ve been saving up to watch again and review since I first saw it a few years ago. I was well into it on that first watch. And I’m still far too uncomfortably well into it now.
Its got bags of integrity. The director and writer Scott Graham is intensely committed to getting through to the heart-rending core of this incestuous relationships far too precious shell.
A few years from now I’ll watch and be as desolated by this again.
Dir: Scott Graham, Scotland
8/10
Windows on the World 