Review No.82: Edge

Last year one of the most-talked about documentary films was Carol Morley's Dreams of a Life which blended real-life experiences with performances from actress Zawe Ashton. Though I haven't seen that film yet its success has meant the brief cinema release of her 2010 fictional film Edge which came onto DVD soonafter. The film follows a collection of disparate characters who are all inhabiting the Cliff Edge Hotel in Dover for differing reasons they include Paul Hilton's washed-up pop-star looking for inspiration, Maxine Peake's lost woman who has returned to the area where her life changed significantly, a young couple who have met on the internet, an older woman with a terminal illness who has come to the area to end her life and the Eastern European staff member who tries to talk her out of it. As Hilton's Glen and Peake's Elly meet in the hotel's bar, run by a very strange woman, they get to know each other a little bit more as he believes he's found his inspiration through her so starts to write a song about her. The film essentially then switches between the three pairs who all talk about bad life experiences, why they've ended up at the Cliff Edge and what they hope to achieve. The film ends by bringing all six characters together on the cliff itself after one of their number threatens to jump off before everybody returns to life as normal.

Morley's message in Edge seems to be that we're all lost and just looking for that person to help us along the way which everybody does to an extent in her film. There are lots of scenes in which the camera simply pans along following the characters not saying anything but instead just in deep contemplation. Though all three stories do get equal footing it is that of Elly that we are most intrigued due to her constant phone-calls and the newspaper clippings that she brings with her while her relationship with the much more upbeat Glen brings her out of herself slightly. The strangest story has to be between youngsters Phillip and Sophie, played by former Skins actor Joe Dempsie and Nichola Burley, who have seemingly met on one of those websites however one of them has tracked the other down for a different purpose. Their story arc throughout is pretty odd and the way it ends is hard to believe seeing as everything they went through up to that point. However my favourite of the three stories is that between Polish maid Agata and older patron Wendy which is like something out of a play as these two very different women talk of shared experiences. Morley's characters sometimes feel real but other times feel like caricatures which is a shame as visually Edge looks the part and resembles its characters very cold, very sad but with moments of brightness. I also found the score to be fairly dour only perked up occasionally by Glen's singing or Phillip whistling the tune his father used to hum. Essentially this felt like a two-part TV series rather than a proper film however there was enough interest in the characters to keep me going throughout despite the fact that, from the reviews I've read, Morley's strengths lie in her documentary work rather than her fictional pieces.

Verdict: A well-shot yet uneven piece Carol Morley's fictional film suffers from an overabundance of melancholy but does have some interesting things to say along the way so I'll give it a 6/10