Wednesday 18 August 2010

Skeletons

Ooh, look at me. I went to see an independent film that won the best film at the Edinburgh Film Festival. See my black polo neck.

Only, no, because this is a great, surreal comedy that deserves a much wider audience than its arthouse distribution will get it. (It played one showing in Liverpool, to a half empty cinema. Whereas you can probably still go and see Sex in the City 2, if some fever takes you.)

Davis and Bennett are a couple of blokes who work for a firm who provide an unusual service. They go into houses, and perform a sort of psychometry, using a range of odd looking detectors and meters, which allows them to discover where all the secrets in the house are, and then go in and find them, then report back to the customer. These secrets seem to reside in cupboards, hence Skeletons.

After a couple of little jobs revealing minor indiscretions to couples, their sinister boss, The Colonel (hello Jason Isaacs!) assigns them something more meaty, helping a woman work out why her husband disappeared eight years ago. There are complications, however, and things swiftly go awry.

The whole thing is surreal and hilarious. Davis and Bennett are an odd pair; one short, pencil moustache, jobsworth, the other huge, ginger and emotionally uncomfortable with just delivering the emotional bombshells and leaving. They bicker and fight like a pair of work colleagues who've been forced together by circumstance, and argue about trivia as they travel from job to job (there's an extended argument about who's better, Gandhi or Rasputin, which is worth the price of admission in and of itself.) The film pulls of the very difficult and impressive feat of having not a minute of it that's not in some way amusing, and yet also being a very poignant tale of loss, guilt, loneliness, isolation, all those marvellous emotions that make us British.

I can't recommend this film highly enough, I suggest you do your best to track it down. You can find a list of the screenings that are yet to come here: http://www.skeletonsthemovie.com/screenings/. That you have to go to so much trouble to track down a film this good is a sad indictment of the state of cinema today.