Better Things

Building on a clutch of award-winning shorts (Field, Love Me or Leave Me Alone), writer-director Duane Hopkins sets his debut feature in the English Cotswolds, but a world away from much that’s green and pleasant. Here it is not just the location that is isolated, but the individuals within it too. Hopkins and cinematographer Lol Crawley (Ballast p.23) bring a poetic realism to their study of people at the fringes of adulthood: youngsters trying to manage the vicissitudes of love whilst filling their days with cheap drugs to combat their boredom and solitude; elderly folk facing the bafflement and adriftness brought by old age. Loneliness is their shared experience, and their struggles to find connection and meaning a common purpose.

With singular vision, Hopkins is unflinching in building a mood of desolation, but this is no one-dimensional exercise in cinematic miserabilism. There is beauty in its restraint, and an agonising empathy and sense of involvement to be found in feelings laid so bare: love brings hurt and confusion, but also offers hope. Utterly believable and directed with graceful assurance, Better Things is auteur filmmaking at its best.
Sandra Hebron