Scott Graham (2015)

A young woman and a teenage boy aboard a car ferry approach an island.  Once they’ve disembarked and driven a little way inland, they burn their car.   They then start walking further inland.  It’s clear that the woman is leading the way but she and the lad don’t exchange a word – or see another person – until they reach and enter a cottage.  A man of around fifty welcomes them in, although he’s clearly surprised to see them.  These are the first few minutes of the writer-director Scott Graham’s new film.  The island to which the couple has come is Iona, part of the Inner Hebrides on the west coast of Scotland.  The young woman’s name is Iona too.  She’s named for the place where she was born and to which she’s returning after a long absence.  The teenager accompanying Iona is her son Billy, who likes to be known as Bull, and their host at the cottage is Danny.  He’s widowed but he and his wife Helen were virtual foster parents to Iona, who grew up in their house along with her near-contemporary Elizabeth, Danny and Helen’s biological daughter.  Elizabeth is now married, to Matthew, an Englishman who farms on Iona, and they have a teenage daughter, Sarah.  She’s unable to walk – the result of a childhood accident.  It’s soon clear there’s bad blood between Iona and Elizabeth.  What lies behind this and the reason for Iona’s return to the island remain to be seen – although repeated flashbacks in Iona’s mind, to an act of violence involving Bull, are a hefty clue to solving the latter mystery.

For a while, Iona is intriguing.  This is thanks to what’s on the screen – people who engage our interest, the austere beauty of the Hebridean landscape – and to the very slowness of the pace and to how little is being disclosed.  The story seems to be set in the present day:  this makes the permeation of religion in the life of Iona all the more striking.  We see the people at worship together in a small, unadorned chapel; Danny prays aloud as he makes breakfast for his new guests in the cottage.  In presenting other community activities – strawberry-picking, a ceilidh – Scott Graham strikes a good balance between documentary description of social ritual and arresting conversational exchanges between the main characters.   The dynamic movement at the ceilidh is an effective contrast to the tempo of the scenes that precede it; the cinematographer, Yoliswa von Dallwitz, injects vividly blue skies and green grass into shots of the rocky, grey terrain.  There comes a point, though, when absorption in Graham’s pregnant atmosphere turns to impatience.  We become so used to the elliptical narrative and so aware there’s an unexplained history that our interest is in finding out what happened before the story began, not in what happens next to the people in it.  And once Scott Graham starts to reveal the backstory, things go badly wrong.

The central relationship in Graham’s previous film Shell, between a father and his teenage daughter, had definite elements of incest.  In Iona, Graham works similar implications into several pairings; some of these implications are more subtle than others but their cumulative effect is to create a governing incestuous pattern to relationships between parents and children.  When we first see Iona (Ruth Negga) and Bull (Ben Gallagher), we don’t know who they are to each other.  We can see her feelings of tenderness for him, though, and we don’t assume from their age difference that they can’t be a couple; we don’t assume either that they’re mother and son, especially since Ben is white and Iona is non-white.  On their arrival at the cottage, it’s hard to tell whether Iona greets Danny (Douglas Henshall) by name or as ‘Daddy’.  That uncertainty may be unintentional (it’s often hard to make out what Ruth Negga says) but it’s prophetically apt, since Danny both raised Iona and fathered her son.  (This was when Iona left the island.)  Bull doesn’t know Danny sired him:  the boy thinks that his biological father was the man who was Iona’s partner in their life on the mainland and whom Bull killed.  (The need to escape the consequences of the crime explains Iona’s return and the burning of the car.)  Because of her disability, Sarah (Sorcha Groundsell) is carried about on the back of Matthew (Tom Brooke) – this makes for an unusual physical proximity between a teenage girl and her father.  We become more conscious of its significance to Sarah when she and Bull leave the ceilidh together and Sarah seems to experience sensual pleasure in the novelty of being carried by a different man.

Perhaps Scott Graham doesn’t mean to imply as much as I’m inferring but the prominence he’s given to sexual feelings between parents and their children in both the features he’s now made makes it difficult for anyone who saw Shell to avoid seeing incestuous possibilities – or, at least, Oedipus and Electra complexes in bloom – throughout Iona, even though the pieces of evidence aren’t individually conclusive.  In the flashbacks to the killing, Iona is on the floor beside the corpse of the father figure Bull has killed; her son stands over them.   Since the motive of the killing is never clarified, this positioning remains suggestive.  At Danny’s cottage, Iona and Bull share the bedroom that Iona and Elizabeth once shared.  The accident which caused irreparable nerve damage to Sarah’s legs occurred when she was riding in her father’s tractor and ‘I was telling him to go faster’.   And the sexual relationship between Iona and Danny definitely resumes.  When Elizabeth (Michelle Duncan) eventually tells Iona how hurt and betrayed she felt by that relationship – in its earlier phase, when the girls were teenagers – she sobs, ‘We were sisters!’   I took this to mean ‘we lived like sisters’ rather than that Danny is Iona’s biological father too – I hope I wasn’t wrong on that point, at least!

The description of the life shared by the two main characters was the outstanding strength of Shell.  The story became increasingly less convincing when things happened outside the heroine’s relationship with her father – and you have to wonder from Iona whether Scott Graham, if he’s going to progress as a film-maker, may need to involve someone else in writing his screenplays in future.   Something clearly went wrong with the construction of Iona:  when it closed last year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, it ran 110 minutes; the version now released (and which I saw on Curzon Home Cinema) is twenty-five minutes shorter.   Some of the plotting, especially around the character of Danny, is evasive.  It’s convenient that his wife has died some time ago (during Iona’s absence); there’s never any suggestion of what effect his sexual relationship with the teenage Iona had on the marriage.  Two thirds of the way through, Danny dies of an unexplained seizure.  The moment of his collapse is startlingly believable (even if it echoes too clearly the epileptic fits to which the father in Shell was prone).  Once you’ve recovered from the shock, you immediately miss Douglas Henshall (who’s particularly expressive showing Danny going about simple domestic routines in the kitchen).  You also realise that Danny has been disposed of because Scott Graham doesn’t know what else to do with the character.

The social strand of Iona disintegrates in the closing stages.  It’s curious, in view of the community Graham presents early on, that Danny’s death registers so little outside the immediate family circle.  The religious theme isn’t abandoned but it’s used, in a disappointingly obvious and unconvincing way, to engineer dramatic conflict.   Iona lost her faith as a teenager:  it’s not made clear whether this was related to her becoming pregnant but she’s now implacably anti-religious.  Bull, on the other hand, although Iona has kept him away from religion throughout his urban upbringing, takes to the island’s Christianity like a duck to water – this is supposed to be because it offers Bull the possibility of forgiveness for his crime but it’s really so that he and his mother can have arguments.  Danny dies too suddenly for us to get any sense of whether he feels there’s a contradiction between his professed beliefs and his sexual behaviour – or whether we’re meant to assume that, because Danny‘s pious, he’s bound to be a hypocrite too.  There’s a further and an unfortunate metaphysical element.  Sarah’s combination of sexual feeling and lower-limbs paralysis doesn’t bode well from an early stage; by the time Bull has intercourse with her, you’re almost praying that it won’t result in a Brimstone and Treacle­-type miracle.  It seems for a few moments your prayers have been in vain but Scott Graham then seems to suggest Sarah has only imagined that she can move her legs.  This ambiguity feels like adding insult to injury, for the character and the audience.

That said, Sorcha Groundsell as Sarah is one of the best things in Iona.  Her beatific prettiness has a childlike quality; at the same time, she’s very good at suggesting that Sarah both resents her condition and knows how to subdue the resentment.  The reliable Tom Brooke gives another strong performance as her father.  Matthew is well aware of the tensions between those closest to him but Brooke also gets across a sense that there’ve been happier experiences for Matthew and his family during Iona’s absence:  this suggestion of a settled life disrupted by Iona’s reappearance is a welcome counterpoint to the increasingly tortured and melodramatic events of the story.  The shadings Tom Brooke brings to his role are what’s lacking in Ruth Negga’s portrait of Iona.  Negga is a sadly lovely and magnetic image in the early scenes but, as the film goes on, she switches from quick-tempered defensiveness to tortured yelling and back, with not much characterisation in between.  Later this year, Ruth Negga will be seen in Jeff Nichols’s Loving, the story of a real-life interracial marriage in 1950s America.  Her character’s ethnicity will be a crucial part of Loving; in Scott Graham’s film, it’s never spoken of – even though Iona is the only person of colour in a community which, in various ways, seems to be living in the past.  We don’t even get the sense it’s something that everyone on the island notices but that no one mentions.

25 March 2016