Dancing in the Dark

Marr's first feature offers a tunneled vision of the 20-year marriage of Edna and Harry in their small suburban home (not just the centre of Edna's world, but her entire universe), where the camera catches the woman like a grub burrowing its way in the soil. Edna's story is told in flashback: sitting in her white dressing-gown in a psychiatric hospital, she examines her notebook (the diary of a mad housewife?) and proceeds to reveal the details of a 20-year career of cleaning, screwing and cooking for her mate before one day deciding to sharpen a kitchen knife against the bones of his ribcage. This murderous act of 'liberation' becomes, in a sense, Edna's birth, where the grub finally asserts its identity after a life led solely to complement that of her boorish husband. Unfortunately it is difficult to base a feature-length film on a character who has no character. Inevitably it makes for a rather tedious and highly non-moving use of exposed silver nitrate on plastic.