Film

My Brother Tom (2001)

Director: Dom Rotheroe

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Rosy Home Counties schoolgirl Jessica (Harrison) is unimpressed by most of her peers' standard acts of teenage unruliness, but intrigued by the boy who hides up trees from them and calls her 'Fee' - fi, fo, fum. This Tom (Whishaw), who shows her his favourite refuge beside a lake deep in the woods, has a hounded, feral quality, as if thoroughly unsocialised. But when Jessica herself experiences the adult world's depredations at the hands of her most trusted teacher, she rejects domestic respectability for the rare, primal intimacy offered by Tom in his sylvan sanctuary. This anti-fairytale is a fervent, effusive account of adolescent metamorphosis that's sharp but not pat on the claustrophobia of a middle-class family. It's almost pantheist out in the woods, where a religious anarchism confronts the complacent hypocrisy of Church and school chaplain with the kids' shows of suffering, communion and ecstasy. It's shot on handheld DV in an intimate go-go style with an urgent intensity; improvising like mad, the two young leads give vibrant, irrepressible performances.

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