A nameless father and a nameless son live in a decrepit field house in what could well be the last semblance of human life left in a nameless place. The Son has been taught to read and write, and he will be taught to shoot. That is all it takes for him to be a man.
The folky, parable-like simplicity of Norfolk is only reinforced by its enigmatic form: a hazy, undefined cinescape of pregnant pauses, shallow focus landscapes and video static. Undercutting this is the intrusion into the queasy, dreamy space by mysterious figures and the ever-looming threat of impending violence.
“The house I live in is an island,” The Son (Barry Keoghan) intones at the film’s beginning, imbuing the statement with innocuous banality and inscrutable foreboding. It’s a statement mirrored in the film itself, which is both divorced from its cinematic predecessors and heavily reliant on viewer-familiarity with them to derive its power and explain plot points. Numerous tropes of British cinema, from rural coming-of-age realism to the recent trend of artier thrillers (such as Catch Me Daddy and most of Ben Wheatley’s output), are funnelled into a melange both familiar and not, then smudged into blurry fragments with a dose of uncanny surrealism.
The most striking such scenes involve The Father, played by Denis Ménochet of Inglourious Basterds fame (again staring down violence in the middle of nowhere with a glass of milk – see what I mean about the familiarity?). The first is how he spends his evenings, watching six analogue television sets tuned to different channels. When the reason is revealed, it only raises more questions. The others involve The Father performing a rehearsed routine to nobody; half-dance, half-training sequence, the moves involve flamboyantly miming enemies in headlocks and slitting their throats.
Notably the decision is made to not just delay that promised destructive gratification, but to erase it entirely. We never see what The Father’s dancing has prepared him for. Every decision taken builds towards or results as a consequence of violence, but all we witness are these interstitial moments, and moments of love, both aggressive and tentative. The film takes place in the spaces, not the big moments, and it lingers in the silences, particularly in the sweet interactions between The Son and a girl from the mysterious intruding group.
In many ways then Norfolk is a grim Brit thriller inverted, blood and anger trapped inside instead of spilling across the frames, the unsentimental displays of love at the forefront, but barely glimpsed. It’s a singular work drawn from many sources, holding a strange power and inviting contemplative viewing, but its ultimately a little too oblique to provide the necessary engagement for us to want to fully get lost in what we’re seeing.
For this reason the film isn’t wholly satisfying in the traditional sense. It takes place in the spaces, so often feels empty. It plays with familiarity, and with the expectations familiarity brings, but chooses to slow dance to a different beat, for better and worse. It’s a relatively unique take on a hoary approach to British cinema, and provides with it a few beautiful images. Importantly, the otherwise too-neat conclusion is nicely rendered uncertain, because of this same hazy attitude that puts the whole film off-centre. Norfolk awkwardly sticks in the throat, but it lingers in the mind.
Norfolk will be showing at Broadway Cinema on Thursday 29 September 2016 at 7:45pm. This will include a Q&A with producer Rachel Dargavel.
Norfolk Trailer
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