Skye-born film-maker Johnny Barrington got a Bafta nomination in 2013 for his short film Tumult and now he opens the Edinburgh film festival with his feature debut: a whimsical coming-of-age drama with a touch of Bill Forsyth, set on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. It is a beautiful, remote landscape whose sweeping emptiness is interestingly used by Barrington and his director of photography Ruben Woodin Dechamps as a blank canvas for gentle flights of fancy.
The result is a likeable, sweet-natured and often funny film, though straying a bit close to away-with-the-fairies tweeness and a bit uncertain on the subject of whether organised religion is bad or not. Louis McCartney and Ella Lily Hyland give very intelligent and sympathetic performances as Dondo and Sas, two high-school kids in the little town of Uig. Dondo lives with his widowed mum Veronica (Victoria Balnaves), in unresolved grief since his fisherman dad was lost at sea one year before, with the body never found. Sas is a very smart girl hoping to study medicine, idly strumming her electric guitar while gazing at a poster of Jimi Hendrix and realising, a little to her chagrin, that she might have feelings for Dondo, her childhood mate, interestingly weird, and obsessed with surfing.
Sas’s uptight mother (Fiona Bell) has no great liking for Dondo, nor for his growing intimacy with Sas, remarking tartly behind his back: “The power of nonsense between that poor boy’s eyes …” Then a strange and charismatic new church minister turns up, played by the RSC’s Mark Lockyer, a man with strong views about surfing or doing anything else on the sabbath, and who even suggests that Dondo’s dad brought his fate on himself by going fishing on the Lord’s day. The minister’s strange, intense conviction and his apparent belief that Dondo’s dad may still be alive somewhere – Lockyer has an amusingly strange pulpit-speech calling upon sea creatures to bring the poor man home – has an overwhelming effect on Dondo, who becomes a believer; the ensuing emotional crisis takes him to the brink of a breakdown.
Barrington has a nice way with comic dialogue and droll setpieces; I loved the school scene in which a grumpy teacher tells Sas that she has to take off her noisy bangles and she agrees only if he will shave off the beard that he has been noisily scratching throughout the last exam paper. There are many nice moments and amusing setups throughout and Barrington has a great feel for the locations. But I wondered if quite enough work had gone into storyline and working out where exactly we are going with all this. In particular there is – and those nervous of spoilers and narrative analysis had better look away now – the issue of whether climaxing a film by burning a building down is a bit route one. But Barrington is entirely within his rights to say that if it’s good enough for Martin McDonagh in The Banshees of Inisherin, it’s good enough for him. Silent Roar has humour and charm.
• Silent Roar screens at the Edinburgh film festival on 18 and 19 August.
