Aneil Karia (2020)
In Aneil Karia’s first feature Surge, Ben Whishaw is Joseph, an airport security worker at Heathrow who walks out of his job and into the breakdown he’s heading for from the word go. The early workplace scenes are fascinating. From an opening long shot of Joseph, the camera gradually closes in. Making his way towards the security area, he’s inconspicuous to others but Whishaw has the slightly over-deliberate walk of someone having to concentrate in order to maintain control. Sequences showing Joseph doing his job stress the odd physical intimacy of frisking strangers for a living. This may be his daily routine yet things are out of joint. An elderly man (Bogdan Kominowski), subjected to a partial strip-search, is exceedingly upset. Another frisked passenger persists in claiming to know Joseph, who gets aggressive in fending off the man’s attentions. It’s Joseph’s birthday and he’s bought a carrot cake to share with Lily (Jasmine Jobson) and other colleagues. The banter among them is unremarkable, Joseph’s way of eating anything but: using a fork, he bites down on it as well as his slice of cake.
Life outside work is hardly less tense. Near the entrance to a block of flats, the noise of the motorbike on which its owner (Perry Fitzpatrick) is always working, drills into and enrages Joseph. Inside his flat, where he lives alone, he drinks from a glass in the same way that he used the fork. When he visits his parents for the weekend, his father Alan (Ian Gelder) picks him up from the station. Joseph arrives late; Alan is stewed up; as he hurries to pull out of the car park, his car makes contact with a pedestrian. The man isn’t physically hurt but a violent row ensues. Back home, Alan, struggling on his own to shift a disused washing machine into the back garden, angrily ignores Joseph’s offers of help. The family’s nerves are shot to pieces even before they sit down for Joseph’s birthday dinner. After timidly reproving her son for swallowing too loudly, his mother Joyce (Ellie Haddington) is hysterically upset to discover that he took ‘just a carrot cake’ in to work. Joyce has got Joseph exactly the same cake and put a few candles on it – now he’s spoiled her birthday treat. It’s not so much predictable as inevitable when Joseph bites right into his water glass, cutting his mouth badly on the shards.
He returns to work but his behaviour there is unhinged and he impulsively quits. He turns up at Lily’s flat, offering to fix the new television she complained wasn’t working, then goes to buy the cable she needs. It’s only £4.99 but Joseph is out of cash. The shop’s card reader won’t accept his card, which an ATM then eats. A nearby bank will accept nothing but a driving licence or passport as ID, and he has neither. It’s enough to drive you mad: in Joseph’s case, this really is the tipping point into nearly unrelieved mania. He robs the bank, buys the cable, gets the TV working, has hurried sex with Lily (she doesn’t object, though she’s surprised), leaves the flat and robs another bank. (He uses the well-worn technique of passing a scribbled note to a clerk while concealing his other arm to pretend he’s holding a gun.) This is far from the end of Surge but it is the point by which it’s becoming monotonous. It stays that way for most of the remainder of its 105 minutes.
Present-day London – the cacophony of traffic noise and sirens, the (pre-Covid) crowds oblivious to Joseph – is, from his point of view, like a nervous breakdown made manifest. It’s a pity that Aneil Karia opts to illustrate his protagonist’s state of mind in such a visually obvious way: the juddering camerawork expresses Joseph’s disturbed apprehension of his surroundings. Once he’s lost it, the film doesn’t build, except in the sense that you know things will get a lot worse before they get better (late that night, for example, he’s hurt in a traffic accident then beaten up). Ben Whishaw is fearless and inventive – miming a swimmer entering the water when Joseph dives into a hectic street, quietly purposeful as he trashes a hotel room – but his playing, thanks to Karia’s approach, is too showcased. It’s no surprise to read reviews praising this, inaccurately, as a ‘career-best’ performance from Whishaw: his virtuoso acting is conspicuous as never before.
Surge has suggestive elements. You occasionally wonder if hyper-sensitivity is what causes Joseph to break down – if the overwrought distress of his parents, or of the weeping man he strip-searched, is as perceived by, and unbearably painful to, Joseph alone. But if he does possess this kind of emotional x-ray vision, it’s erratic. The shop assistants, bank and hotel personnel he encounters are played naturally and neutrally, and there’s no indication that Joseph sees anything different in them. When he wanders into a wedding reception taking place in the hotel he’s booked into, the vileness of the best man (Chris Coghill) whose speech he interrupts isn’t something exaggerated in Joseph’s mind: others in the wedding party are horrified by what they’re hearing. The fraught interactions between Joseph and his wretched, infantilising mother are hard to ignore. Having calmly disembowelled the hotel room quilt, he clambers inside its ‘skin’ and tries to sleep; he might be returning to the womb. The image articulates strikingly with Joyce’s concluding speech (very well delivered by Ellie Haddington), in which she tearfully tells her son that, when carrying him, she kept praying he’d be kept safe. This element is certainly interesting but it, too, feels half-baked.
The screenplay, by Rupert Jones and Rita Kalnejais, derives from Karia’s twelve-minute Beat (2013), also starring Ben Whishaw. Knowing that makes it difficult to avoid thinking Surge is essentially a short film stretched thin. (Jim Cummings’s engaging Thunder Road (2018) was another recent instance of this.) It ends with Joseph, still awaiting arrest, in an untypically relaxed mood. Watching a group of Asian women dance in the street, he smiles, seemingly at peace. If he’s got whatever was wrong out of his system, it’s hard to know how – beyond the fact that Joseph must be exhausted by the events of the last couple of days.
3 June 2021
