MIFF Session 9: HAPPY NEW YEAR, COLIN BURSTEAD

Colin, his wife and daughter are getting ready for a family event, a New Years Eve party at a country manor. He's on the phone to his sister who's invited the family ne'erdowell David and is already regretting the upset this will cause, particularly with their mum whose worried about her husband's financial chaos ... And on. Everyone gets to the venue and the chemistry experiment gets fizzy, explosive and chaotic as elements do battle. You've seen this before. Of course you have and writer/director Ben Wheatley depends on it. Ah, the strange vision behind films as diverse as Sightseers, Kill List, A Field in England and High Rise is having a crack at a Mike Leigh ensemble piece. What could go wrong?

Well, plenty and all of it is good. Do we really need another Abigail's Party? Maybe not but if Wheatley is trying it on it's like Led Zeppelin trying Reggae on Houses of the Holy: everyone's having a go at that but why are THEY doing it? Well, while this piece with its self-avowed cast improvisations might seem like an exercise in coasting I think we're looking at a very assured filmmaker edging towards something that is both homage to signature British filmmaking and the kind of radical move T.S. Eliot wrote of when he suggested that revolutions in poetry should start with a return to the banal. On a limb, I'm going to compare this not just with Bleak Moments or High Hopes but with The Blair Witch Project. That guerilla style movie (twenty years old this year) drilled back to the origins of horror and forged a new campfire tale. Colin Burstead is a kind of base touch; not so much proof that he can do it but that it needs doing.

With a cast that boasts the heights of Charles Dance and Bill Paterson along with faces you will know from The Office and a score of other U.K. tv (including the wonderful Haley Squires, also in In Fabric at this year's fest but broke through in Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake), you know you are in for a mass of naturalistic comedy and tight emotional venting. All of that is here. Also, a film that suggests intra-familial cataclysm takes delicate care to deliver a climax that involves the delivery of documents and you understand that this cold and often severe moviemaker wants you to also feel the warmth. By the time we got to Auld Lang Syne I felt like clapping.