London to Brighton: a brilliant materpiece you can Watch Instantly on Netflix

Two girls rush into a small room and slam the door behind them. They’re bloodied and beaten. Or are they? It seems one of them is strangely made up instead of beaten. How old is she? The other has her eye grotesquely swollen shut. They’re frantic. Are they being chased? The door starts to open behind them.

“Fuck off! Fuck off!” one of them yells, bracing herself against the door.

But it’s just a public bathroom and it was just someone trying to come in to use it. Whatever peril they’re running from isn’t right behind them. The girl with the swollen eye tends to her friend. “You’ve got to stop,” she says, trying to clean up her friend’s face while she wails.

London to Brighton opens with a bang and it doesn’t let up. It’s a powerful, grueling, dark film and arguably “just a thriller”, but it’s easily one of the most searing British dramas since, say, Mike Leigh’s Naked. You’d never guess it’s from a young first-time filmmaker whose previous experience was as an actor, and then shooting music videos. It was shot for $80,000 over 19 days, but it looks gorgeous (and it’s not DV!). You don’t know any of the cast members, but the three principles are amazing. I encourage you to watch it without reading anything further – not even the plot synopsis on Netflix – because so much of the genius of London to Brighton is how it unfolds, how its characters are revealed, and how much and how little you know about what has happened.

You can rent it from Netflix or even watch it instantly here (be warned that it will skew Netflix into thinking you like dark British thrillers with strong female leads). And then you can join this thread after you’ve seen it. Because if you keep reading before you’ve seen it, I will end up ruining some of it for you.

 -Tom

My favorite thing about this movie is Lorraine Stanley as Kelly. The script is great, but her take on it is what makes it such a stand-out. And I love that she looks like a real person and not a starlet. She reminds me a bit of Sacha Horler from Praise, a fantastic 1998 Australian movie about another character who uses sex as a form of empowerment. But London to Brighton is so gritty and matter-of-fact about Kelly’s sexuality. She calls it “going to work” (contrast this to how sex is parleyed to Joanne as “playing”) and the shot of her fucking the guy in the car is chilling. Her face is a grimace, much like a guy lifting something heavy at his job. Pain? Effort? Determination? And I love the character development in the preceding scene in which she sets the price with the guy.

“How much?” he asks.
“Thirty quid.”
“Thrity quid? With that face?”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it.”
“Okay, thirty quid, but no johnny.”

A johnny, of course, is a condom. And this is a contemporary setting. You can imagine what’s going through Kelly’s mind, but you know how desperate she is for the money. So normally, the tough-as-nails hooker would negotiate for twenty quid, but with a johnny. Self-preservation and all.

However, at this point, Kelly has come so far, and been through so much with Joanne, and tapped so deeply into whatever maternal instinct she may have (you know all you need to know about her own childhood from the look she gives when Joanne asks if she’s named the doll Wendy because that was her mother’s name).

“Forty quid and no Johnny,” she says.

It’s a wonderful bit of writing and probably the moment of Kelly’s redemption. After all her complicity in what’s happened – one of the movie’s most disturbing reveals – this is that small moment in a dramatic arc when you see clearly where the character has arrived.

That’s part of what’s so fascinating about London to Brighton. Both Derek and Kelly are complicit in what happens to Joanne. They’re morally reprehensible people, but both pitiable. It’s easy to have sympathy for Kelly as you see her and Joanne bonding, but it’s nearly miraculous that Johnny Harris’ performance as Derek evokes so much sympathy, even as he’s leading these two girls to their own murder (it helps that he looks like Eddie Marsan, a wonderful English actor who’s a natural with roles like this). When Derek holds out his hand to Kelly to show her it’s shaking because he’s angry, it’s such a transparent comment. His hand is shaking because he’s scared. He’s confused and dim and not brave enough to think about what’s right. He’s villainous because he’s weak. He’s the classic small time thug, a victim of circumstance, and the perfect foil to Kelly, with a measure of charm in his clear eyes instead of Kelly’s sexuality behind her bruised face. The scene in which Derek and Kelly “negotiate” with Joanne while she eats ice cream is probably my favorite in the movie for how well it triangulates these three characters in relation to each other.

And then there’s Georgia Groome as Joanne, who’s pretty unassuming through most of the movie. But, good lord, does she manage to make the final scene hit hard. Seeing a kid that age (she was fourteen when the movie was finished) in such anguish is really hard to watch, and she commits completely. On the DVD, there’s footage of her audition. She does a bit of the scene and it’s okay, but then she tries it a second time. Before the second attempt, she closes her eyes and goes totally still for a moment. I’m not sure I want to know where a fourteen-year-old girl goes at that point so that she can come out and do what she does in the second half of the audition. Which is nothing compared to the final scene in the back seat of the Jeep. That scene is so difficult to watch the first time you see the movie. It’s not much easier the second time.

Also, smoking in movies is usually such a peripheral thing. But I loved the way this movie established cigarettes as a way people interact. They smoke each other’s cigarettes, they give each other cigarettes, they have a smoke together, they take the pack because they don’t have any, they take a cigarette and tuck it behind an ear. It’s a great naturalistic touch, but I love how it all comes to a head when we find out why Stuart, the avenging gangster, doesn’t smoke. Which ties into his story about his father, which leads to the final reveal: that he just sat there and watched his father bleed to death. Like all the best stories, isn’t that what it all comes down to? Fatherhood. Motherhood*. What we’ve become by our parents. And for such a bleak movie whose final point is that it’s too late for Kelly, for Derek, and for Stuart, it’s not too late for Joanne, restored to her grandmother’s house after all.

 -Tom
  • That’s no typo in the thread’s subject line.

I also watched and really liked this movie sometime last year. The scenes following Kelly and Joanne journeying around London and the rest of the country give a much clearer, more truthful picture of the UK than a thousand Richard Curtis or Guy Ritchie films. From my admittedly poor recollection I thought the film suffered a bit when Kelly’s escape plan collides with the ‘house of slackers’ and that whole section of the film feels awkward. Its all worth it for the perfectly judged reveal scenes though. The set and atmosphere there is perfect, the awkwardness, class tension and dramatic tension in a middleclass suburban house.

A piece of advice is to avoid his next film “The Cottage” because its nothing like this and was a real disappointment. A fairly tedious comedy horror that isn’t terrifying or funny.

You seem to be a bit of a fan of these small british films Tom. No idea if you’ve seen it already but ‘This Is England’ is similar to this but somehow even better and is a film I’d reccomend to anyone interested in indie British Film. The writer/director of that, Shane Meadows, has also done some other excellent films as well ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ being one I’d particularly highlight.

I saw The Cottage before London to Brighton, so I went in with no expectations. I actually quite liked The Cottage for its schizo genre-jumping and the gravity Andy Serkis gave it. But, yeah, it’s nothing like his first movie.

The bit in the slacker house in Brighton is actually pretty brief. I think what’s weird about it is that Derek holds Kelly and Joanne there for what seems like a full day after having run everyone out with a shotgun. Did none of them call the cops? Because that seems like what would follow naturally.

Oooh, I loved Dead Man’s Shoes! Thanks for the tip on This Is England. Netflix’d!

 -Tom

Can you put the toy in please

Wow. Thank you for this recommendation, Tom.

iirc, Stuart told Derek on the phone that it would be an hour or two before they would be at the flat. This was shortly after he had chased everyone out. My impression was that it was late afternoon and it slowly turned to dark by the time Stuart arrived.

This is a great movie, it’s like a mix between Pulp Fiction and Taxi Driver.

The guy who played Derek was especially good. You really, REALLY don’t want to like his character(or should I say relate to his character) but you can’t help it. He has such charisma, you can see how he gets his girls to follow his commands.

Most of the characters in this movie are basically disgusting people. The fact that I actually cared about what happened to them tells me just how good the whole production(acting, writing, direction) really was.

I figured the ‘slackers’ had stuff going on in their crashpad that they didn’t necessarily want the cops to know about. I figured they all left, went somewhere to kill time and let the situation play itself out, then they’d creep back and see if it was safe to go home. That’s why the friend even apologized on her way out, it was a ‘sorry but you’re on your own’ apology.

btw Tom, how robust is the extra features set on the DVD? I’m tempted to put that in my real Netflix queue just to be able to watch them.

Well worth it, Cubit. There’s no director’s commentary, but there are a few deleted scenes, which aren’t deleted so much as trimmed down. You can tell that Paul Andrew Williams went into shooting without a lot of fat on the script. He knew what he wanted and they barreled through their 19-day shoot to get it.

There’s also a truly terrible alternate ending which involved the teddy bear Joanne got at the Brighton arcade. Georgia Groome’s audition footage is included. There’s a “making of” featurette that works great as a way to decompress after watching the movie.

But the real value is a well-edited cast and crew Q&A at a 2006 London screening. It’s got some great stuff and it’s really nice to hear Williams talk about the movie (and you can tell he’s nervous about his upcoming bigger-budget project, which will turn out to be The Cottage). However, it’s really disappointing that there is almost nothing from Lorraine Stanley, who I think is the movie’s greatest strength. I really wanted to hear more from her.

It seems from her IMDB page that she’s mainly a British television actress. I was delighted to spot her in a tiny role in Eden Lake, but the fact of the matter is that no one really makes movies for actresses like Stanley, or Sacha Horler, the Australian actress I mentioned. Regardless of talent, they seem to end up on TV playing the best friend of the ingenue. :(

-Tom

I watched this last night, and while I wouldn’t necessarily say I enjoyed it, I thought it was very well done.

One of my favorite parts was the scene at the beach when Kelly and Joanne first arrive in Brighton. From Joanne playing in the surf to the bit with the empty cups in the wind, skittering across the stones–so beautifully done, and such a cool counterpoint to the grimy tension of the previous scenes.

Thanks for the recommendation, Tom!

This wasn’t a bad movie, but it’s hardly worth all the adulation Tom is pouring on it.

The weight of verbiage is clearly on my side of the argument, so you’re obviously wrong! :)

Seriously though, care to elaborate? Why didn’t it work for you? Do you just not like Dark British Movies with Strong Female Leads?

-Tom

I didn’t say it didn’t work for me; I just wasn’t blown away by it. It worked as a tight little story without a lot of extraneous distractions, montages, music videos, etc. That’s a major plus. And I have nothing against strong female leads or foreign films. But as well acted as it was, there just wasn’t a lot happening. This could just as easily have been a 20-25 minute short and conveyed the same story.

I don’t think it helped that I predicted a great portion of the story long before elements appeared onscreen, so that could be influencing my opinion.

Noun, I’m not trying to be contentious – well, any more so than usual – but I’m having a hard time reconciling this:

…with this:

You’re basically saying it was an hour too long? What parts did you feel weren’t necessary? Granted, necessary is as subjective a term as “interesting” or “fun”, but I found the movie really sleek and lean. I’d have a hard time thinking of bits that weren’t crucial.

By the way, London to Brighton was build up from a short film with, I think, both Johnny Harris and Lorraine Stanley playing the same characters. It was called Royalty and I’m disappointed it wasn’t on the DVD. Now that Paul Andrew Williams seems to be getting firmly entrenched in horror movies, I want to see more of his pre-horror stuff.

Oooh, if you read this thread before you watched the movie, you’re in trouble, mister! To me, the great unexpected reveal, which was more like a gradually mounting series of reveals, was how far Kelly goes along with what happens to Joanne. In other words, how flawed she was as a character.

-Tom

I don’t think I can answer this without spoiling the movie entirely for anyone else who has yet to see this. Shall I PM the details?

By the way, London to Brighton was build up from a short film with, I think, both Johnny Harris and Lorraine Stanley playing the same characters. It was called Royalty and I’m disappointed it wasn’t on the DVD. Now that Paul Andrew Williams seems to be getting firmly entrenched in horror movies, I want to see more of his pre-horror stuff.

Now I really want to see the original short film as well. I have a feeling I’ll like that version much better.

Oooh, if you read this thread before you watched the movie, you’re in trouble, mister! To me, the great unexpected reveal, which was more like a gradually mounting series of reveals, was how far Kelly goes along with what happens to Joanne. In other words, how flawed she was as a character.

Heh, now that I did not do! I tend to stay the hell away from most movie threads until I see the film for myself because I don’t want to risk being spoiled. The Netflix envelope had been sitting on my TV for several days when I saw your post, which reminded me to finally watch it so I could read and comment. No, for whatever reason, I just knew what was going to happen before it happened all through the movie. I’m usually clueless about that sort of thing, I don’t know why I was so prescient for this one.

It’s not mating season yet for my species.

Dude, this is a thread only for people who have seen the movie. They’re warned of that in the original post. Spoil away!

Besides, who reads threads before they see movies? Insanity.

 -Tom

I was underwhelmed. Perhaps its because the story unfolded pretty much exactly how I expected, and I had never heard of it before watching it, so its not like I read a spoiler somewhere. I think the part of Kelly was well written and well acted, but overall the film was plodding and dull.

Thanks for the recommendation, and I can also vouch for This Is England being well worth watching, I saw it at the cinema and it was excellent.

No kidding, Lh’owon! I just watched it. Now that’s a bildungsroman!

And a great story about Thatcher’s England. I was worried a few times that it was going to get heavy-handed, particularly given the subject matter. But no such thing happened, even at the end. The character’s motivation was not conveniently tagged as “racism”, but was clearly several layers of sadness and anger and frustration. I’ll take This Is England over American History X or Romper Stomper any day. Even over The Believer.

Great cast, too. I’m going to keep my eye on Stephen Graham, the fellow who played Combo.

 -Tom