Lotus Eaters: movie review

Over a grainy black-and-white palette, a group of bright young bourgeois Brits indulge in boundless party-hopping, casual sex and other pleasuredomeish pursuits. All this endlessly numbing fun is wonderful, at least until the spindly, artlessly apathetic Alice (Antonia Campbell-Hughes)—who achieves a notch more likability than her perpetually pouty cohorts—loses her troubled love interest (Johnny Flynn, a rising folk singer) to heroin. Being photogenic and rich is, like, totally rough for the blasé mannequins in Alexandra McGuinness’s feature debut, though it’s fun to note the glamorous Londoners’ fabulously hipster-posh ensembles. Perhaps the director is trying to show her socialites’ path to finding themselves, but her point ends up as lost as the film’s aimless hedonists; like its characters, Lotus Eaters is a visual treat—and emotionally vapid.