Make Up: Feminist Art Film Gussied Up as Ghoulish Thriller Packs Unexpected Wallop
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
On a dark winter night, a car pulls into a Cornwall seaside trailer camp. A young woman, Ruth (Molly Windsor) leans against the window, chewing her nail as she looks out. She hoists her suitcase out, and seeing a light in a caravan window, tentatively knocks on the door.
The door swings open and the middle-aged camp manager, a woman named Shirley — with a pile of brassy hair and a wheezy laugh — ushers her in, apologizing for the dead phone. Ruth explains she has come to stay with her boyfriend who has a seasonal job at the camp. For some reason, Tom’s unavailable to meet but Shirley orders another man, a surly brute named Kai, to take her to the trailer.
At this point, you might mentally start the countdown for the film’s first scream. A soul-sucking growling demon? A blade-wielding masked killer? A sinister sacrificial cult? Sorry, fan boys and girls. Make Up, first feature from Claire Oakley, turns out to be an artful bit of bait-and-switch.
The entire film plays with the tension and atmosphere of a horror movie, but its true genre is a feminist art film, a sister to the films of Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, Red Road) or a wintery answer to Lucretia Martel’s tropical fever-dream Holy Girl.
From the start, the partly occupied camp, seen through Ruth’s eyes, is insistently ominous. The wind moans, the sea rolls like black oil, the beach grass rises up like fur, and circles of mist hang around the weak lights. Inside the cabins — wrapped in plastic sheeting like the aftermath of a crime scene — aren’t much better. An angry German Shepherd confronts her; its owner Kai suggests, in crude terms, that it’s her female smell.
Also, Ruth’s boyfriend Tom (Joseph Quinn) is possibly cheating on her. Ruth finds a trace of a lipstick kiss on the trailer mirror and then, a long red hair on his shirt. At Tom’s urging, Ruth applies for a job at the camp and is instantly hired.
As the couple are separated all day, engaged in their menial jobs, arriving home at night for their unchanging dinner of spaghetti and water, we can feel — in gazes, brief spats, and awkward silences —the collapse of their relationship. Maybe it’s because Tom eats his spaghetti between two slices of white bread, which could kill the magic of any romance.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
As Ruth makes her rounds from the trailers to the communal laundry room and showers, she keeps running into the most magnetic worker in the RV camp, a confident free spirit who goes by the name of Jade (Stefanie Martini) and who Tom warns has a “reputation.”
Jade stares hard at her and makes an interesting proposition: She can help Ruth stop biting her nails. She takes Ruth into her trailer, where she keeps racks of home-made wigs to sell to the tourists, including one with long red hair.
As the two share a joint and drinks, Jade arms Ruth with a new set of crimson acrylic nails. Back at the trailer, Ruth isn’t quite ready to take that step. She chips the nails off with a knife, and gazes at the bloody fragments that forms in the sink.
At under 90 minutes, Make Up doesn’t include much action but the skin-crawling effect of the film reverberates until after the credits roll. The entire technical package — the menacing visuals, the rumbling soundscape, the brief disorienting sequences of flashbacks and dreams — are anchored in naturalistic, understated performances.
Forget the ghosts and serial killers. There’s enough drama in being a young woman, plunging into roiling seas of adult life.
Make Up. Written and directed by Claire Oakley. Starring Molly Windsor, Joseph Quinn, Stefanie Martini, Theo Barklem-Biggs, and Lisa Palfey. Available on VOD and digital media starting January 19.