I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning: the British housing crisis is ever present in Clio Barnard’s touching story of a Birmingham friendship group

• Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival

Clio Barnard’s latest film (which debuted at Cannes in the Directors Fortnight) continues the director’s deep commitment to exploring working-class characters and milieux, this time set in Birmingham and lodged in a group of long-time pals who have grown up but not necessarily out of the old neighbourhood. It’s a loving return to what once was a cliché of British film: the noble working class, crushed by defeat (economic) or dependence (drink, drugs). Films designed to tug at audience heartstrings.  
 
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning turns away from the purely psychological and adjusts old formulae for a new Reform UK era where empathy for suffering is no longer a guarantee. Politics may not be the focus of Barnard’s film, despite an immersion in class and race trajectories and collisions, but they’re never out of sight. It explores the nature of (male) friendship, the far more circumscribed lives of women as they revolve around their men, and above all, the centripetal force that both empowers and destabilises those who would escape their supposed class destiny.  

The film is a swirl of music and lights, where the grubbiness of day jobs alternates with the fleeting freedoms of nightlife. There are updates to the old tradition in best friends Patrick (Anthony Boyle) and Rian (Joe Cole), who offer a refresh on class striving and its pitfalls. Rian has made a fortune (supposedly daytrading on his laptop, though that backstory is never shown) and already moved away – to London, with a swanky apartment and, at least briefly, a girlfriend (Millie Brady) to match. Patrick briefly got out, too, by the once-dependable route of a university degree (Leeds), but in an era of downsized mobility, he is now a food delivery guy on a bicycle. He’s married to Shiv (Lola Petticrew), the woman who holds the old gang together and bandages their wounds, even while raising two adorable daughters. Two other pals, Oli (Jay Lycurgo) and Conor (Daryl McCormack), offer contrapuntal lessons on the difficulty of change, the fatality of defeat, and the euphoria of rare victories.  

The city of Birmingham figures as a character, too: the device of Patrick’s bike delivery job permits an ongoing roving view of the city’s neighbourhoods as he cycles through. The heart of community, though, is found in the pubs and clubs where the film’s characters cohere, console, and celebrate its narrative turns. There’s a euphoria to the pub scenes that never feels forced; a genuine sense of community forged in happiness as much as sorrow.  

The script by Enda Walsh, adapted from the eponymous novel by Keiran Goddard, sketches a universe revolving around these friends, their ups and downs, births and deaths, and the women who love them or leave them. A few laughs are allowed: when Rian brings his fancy girlfriend back to town to check construction of a new housing complex he’s bankrolled, Conor describes the afternoon with wonder: “It’s like Kate Middleton came to visit!”. As building costs escalate, Conor starts drinking, threatening his marriage, his relationship to his new baby, even his life. Meanwhile, Oli struggles with drugs and resolves to go sober, and might even get a girl. Lola Petticrew is never quite given enough to do, though Barnard makes sure that she gets her fair share of screen time, compensating for the underwriting of her character – and naturally, the camera loves her. She’s the rock of the film’s little community and a reliable audience guide through a slice of a world that would otherwise be off-limits, inscrutable.  

I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is very much centred on the dynamics between its characters, but genre conventions are expanded through the focus cited in its title: the ongoing destruction of housing for the working class and, with that, the hollowing out of community. Hallucinatory images of tall housing projects being bulldozed or blown up interrupt the narrative flow – portents of a darker future. Patrick spouts ideas and analyses on the subject, presumably lodged in his brain and heart from his university years, as he details how the foreclosing of economic possibility has decimated life for everyone in communities like this, everyone living without money.   

The destruction of housing, emblematised through the film’s spectral visions, may be Patrick’s obsession, but it haunts all the characters’ life decisions. The sight of smoke floating off the collapsing buildings inevitably evokes the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, gone nearly a decade now, with 72 dead, and survivors still waiting for any modicum of justice. The disappearance of housing in the current world order is rarely addressed in films, but Barnard’s visions of these imploding buildings succeeds in making them an emblem of evil, a concrete embodiment of political corruption that’s sure to damage Birmingham’s social fabric for generations to come. 

The sharp political analysis of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning bears Barnard’s signature even as the film fulfils a more basic mandate: the ongoing demise of working-class life as Britain used to know it. Jobs gone, housing gone, lives going. In the midst of it all, people fall in love, babies are born, and best pals rent asunder can still find their way back to the sacred bonds of friendship.