One of her best sequences is a bad dream that Ruth has, which is simply a static shot of some marram grass on the beach, which over five or 10 seconds turns from green to reddish brown, as if being poisoned. Oakley shows how without the intoxicant of sunshine and holidays, you can see the everyday textures and surfaces more clearly, yet they are just as sensual. The whole place at this time of year is a ghost, an uncanny wraith of its summer self. The idea of a ghost in the holiday resort is appropriate and yet a tautology.
REVIEW OF KEN PARK MOVIE WINDOWS
Is Tom having an affair? But then why can she see this same kiss-shape mysteriously appearing at night on the windows of caravans that are supposed to be empty – caravans that have been hygienically sealed in polyurethane wrapping for the winter – like a ghostly ectoplasm? Is this place haunted? Or is Ruth herself experiencing a spectral, psychosexual premonition of something in her own future?
Ruth is disturbed to see strands of bright red hair in the bed she shares with Tom, and the faint remains of a cupid’s-bow kiss on the mirror. The one friendly face is Jade (Stefanie Martini), whose hobby is makeup and hairstyling and who offers to give Ruth a makeover. Ruth is reasonably content, although Kai (Theo Barklem-Biggs), the other lad working there minding the guard dog, is a nasty piece of work.
Manager Shirley (Lisa Palfrey) takes her on, and allows Ruth and Tom to stay in one of the static caravans, with much lascivious giggling about how the last couple to occupy it ended up having a baby. There is something unwelcoming about it, but Ruth is at least expected: she is the girlfriend of Tom (Joseph Quinn) who works at the resort, and she’s hoping to get cleaning work there herself. Molly Windsor (whom I last saw 10 years ago as a child actor in Samantha Morton’s The Unloved) plays Ruth, a teenager who shows up after dark at what looks like an utterly deserted caravan site: it is winter, of course, so it could be just after supper or four in the morning. With cinematographer Nick Cooke, Oakley finds the bracingly different aspects of the Cornish landscape: ominous in the darkness, wild in the sunshine and menacing in the cold, as distant sea spray mixes with the cloud cover. She has taken the template of arthouse Brit realism and audaciously spiked it with some genre thrills, as if Ken Loach collaborated with Brian De Palma or Nicolas Roeg. Writer-director Claire Oakley taps into this mood for her debut feature, a psychological drama-thriller set in a wintry caravan park in St Ives, Cornwall. T he out-of-season holiday resort, like the abandoned city or ruined temple, has something fascinating and even erotic in its emptiness.