D is for Distance: a personal, hallucinatory journey through medical bureaucracy

The dulcet tremolo of Ennio Morricone’s ‘A Dimly Lit Room’ from Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) bookends D is for Distance, the first feature in 15 years from Chris Petit, the director of the motorik cult classic Radio On (1979) and sundry psychogeographic forays with Iain Sinclair. And as he and his co-director Emma Matthews close a film that pines for many bygones, from the spaces of analogue cinema to their epileptic son Louis’s personality and memories from before they fell down a medical rabbit hole, they quote six-gun shootouts, the door frame that ends The Searchers (1956) and the serenade from Rio Bravo (1959). But where Sergio Leone’s 1968 film elegised the wide open west abolished by the railroad, this film probes our diminished digital world where the “deep inner space” of Louis’s lost journeys, under seizure or medication, seems the only frontier.

D is for Distance is a family affair, edited as well as co-directed by Matthews, Petit’s partner and regular collaborator, with their son Louis silently in frame over the years and finding voice through his artworks. It joins several other recent intergenerational documentaries: Victoria Mapplebeck’s Motherboard (2024), a testament to two decades of single-mothering; Ross McElwee’s Remake (2025), about his filming relationship with his late bipolar son Adrian, lost to addiction and an overdose. In a reversal of the relationship, Charlie Shackleton’s As Mine Exactly (2022) mixed VR and live performance to evoke his dislocating childhood experiences of his mother’s epilepsy.

Petit and Matthews’ film is more collaged and essayistic, though it incorporates harrowing personal footage and testimony; Matthews’ plaintive calls to her unresponsive son – “Louis? Louis?” – become a refrain (doctors encouraged her to film his seizures). Jodhi May’s narration relates Louis’s thoughts both in first and third person, while the authorial parents are wholly in distancing third person. And while “the mother” focuses on fraught communication and care (there’s a seam of furious disillusionment with doctors and the NHS), the aloof-presenting “father” takes Louis on a train and boat trip to the Arctic north.

This journey incorporates notes from “a film that will never get made” – seemingly about the paranoiac CIA counterespionage veteran James Angleton. From him, Petit further free-associates, from William Burroughs to internet barons, Grünewald’s Crucifixion and the back of David Bowie’s head. There’s a flavour of Adam Curtis’s 20th-century psychohistories, enhanced by hallucinatory silent-film clips, which also fold back to Louis’s gothic drawings. How to encapsulate – emerge from – all this? Petit sees time running out and writing on the wall – and the ground is strange and shifting.

► D is for Distance is in UK cinemas 3 April.