I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

Clio Barnard’s (The Arbor) bruising new drama is a picture of modern England seen through the eyes of five Brummie friends. It’s uplifting to see a piece of British cinema so attuned to the hopes and attitudes of young Brits, a grainy, 16mm snapshot of society firmly in the lineage of Shane Meadows, Andrea Arnold, Ken Loah, Tony Richardson et al, and played out by a clutch of gifted actors.

Like Rocco and His Brothers with a Bromwich burr, it’s the story of a tight-knit friendship group swimming against the economic tide. Barnard and screenwriter Enda Walsh (Disco Pigs, Small Things like These) crystallise the challenges of modern life, with its struggling families, unmet aspirations and property ladders with no rungs. The Irish playwright has streamlined Birmingham poet Keiran Goddard’s multi-perspective novel into an ensemble drama with boundless love for its characters, if not always quite enough room.

We enter this un-levelled up cityscape through the pub doors: childhood sweethearts Patrick (Anthony Boyle) and Shiv (Lola Petticrew), new dad and building site foreman Conor (Daryl McCormack), and wealthy charmer Rian (Joe Cole) are out celebrating their hard-partying mate Oli’s (Jay Lycurgo) 30th. Shots are necked, bumps of coke snorted and the room filled with decades’ worth of love and goodwill. The Streets’ 2002 anthem ‘Don’t Mug Yourself’ blasts out of the speakers, a throwback to a more hopeful kind of hedonism. 

Here, though, booze and drugs represent something darker. Back in the cold light of day, Oli is dealing heroin, Conor is fighting to control his rage and live up to his responsibilities, Patrick is toiling in a gig economy job, while the Bentley-driving Rian, on paper the one success story, is burying his guilt by building a new high-rise for local families. Shiv, meanwhile, is hit by a life-altering bombshell. They’re all hard-grafting young millennials who’ve turned 30 to discover nothing around the corner. 

These young millennials turn 30 to discover that there’s nothing around the corner. 

With her three Peaky Blinders alumni – Cole, Lycurgo and the beefed-up McCormack – as well as House of Guinness’s Boyle and his Say Nothing co-star Petticrew, Barnard has the perfect blend of intensity and charisma to bring these likeable people and their personal battles to life. The spiralling Conor is the most brutal manifestation of this unforgiving society, losing focus, drifting away from his wife (an underused Lucie Shorthouse) and back into bad habits. 

Cole’s brooding Rian fumbles his relationship with a posh southern girl he met on the apps. His emotional inarticulacy spills over into something self-destructive, which leads to a scene which spells out the film’s thesis around wealth disparity and generational decline, a lurch into didacticism it really doesn’t need.

Overall, though, this is a timely drama from a director with a growing canon of eloquent humanist work – a melancholy torch song to the stories that play out beneath our changing skylines. 

I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.