These
Welsh teens ought to be happily working in coal mines and listening to Tom
Jones. Instead, they spend too much time in a creepy internet chatroom that may
or may not be encouraging them to take their own lives. Many have already. As a
result, their county has become internationally notorious as a so-called “suicide
cluster.” It is a very real, still unresolved tragedy that gets a fictional
work-up in Danish documentarian Jeppe Rønde’s English language narrative Bridgend (trailer here), which screens as
part of the AFI’s 2015 EU Film Showcase.
Dave
the copper has returned to his ancestral home of Bridgend with his moody
teenaged daughter Sara, despite knowing suicide runs rife amongst the young
adult population. There he will apparently be the only civil servant investigating
Wales’ most notorious string of untimely deaths. Hey, a gig’s a gig—and what’s
the worst that can happen? Despite her Englishness, Sara quickly falls in with
her fellow classmates, because they presumably have open spots for new mates.
It
does not take long for tragedy to strike anew, but she is shocked to hear it is
Thomas, the school’s bad boy with whom she had already developed a complicated
relationship. She soon falls back on her first choice, the ineffectual minister’s
son Jamie. He is a sensitive lad, who takes Thomas’s kid brother under his
wing, but he seems to know more about the suicide epidemic than he lets on.
Rønde’s
film is ill-conceived right from the start, largely since the Bridgend phenomenon
remains an open mystery. You can tell he is conflicted, laboring to find the
right tone and structure, vacillating between some sort of high-end genre
conspiracy yarn and a meditative examination of grief and alienation. Magnus
Nordenhof Jønck’s lush cinematography is stunningly evocative and Rønde has an
undeniably keen sense of visual composition, but the film suffers from an
initial, insurmountable credibility gap. You just can’t accept a single widower
father would knowingly move his angsty, overwrought daughter to a known suicide
cluster.
Problematically,
Game of Thrones’ Hannah Murray and
Josh O’Connor are both rather vanilla as Sara and Jamie. Frankly, the film
feels the lack of Scott Arthur’s Thomas and his visceral brooding rather acutely.
Elinor Crawley is also so charismatic as Sara’s welcoming new BFF Laurel, we necessarily
fear for her longevity in the film.