Shell

(Scott Graham/2012/UK)

Shell is a teenager living with her dad in the garage and petrol station they run nestled in the Scottish highlands beside a loch. The landscape is bleak, fog strewn and windswept and matches the emotional state of most of the characters in this brooding coming of age drama. With her mum having left when she was four Shell has gradually inhabited the maternal void, cooking, cleaning, serving in the petrol station and caring for her dad who suffers from epileptic attacks. There is an uncomfortable strand of an Electra complex in the household too as Shell projects herself wholly into the wife/mother role. It’s not surprising given her confined existence, bereft of any real social interaction bar the sparse trickle of customers to the station for refuelling. The characters that enter her life through the station and give Shell her only social reference points are woefully inadequate or damaged in their own way. Thus her slide into a warped emotional attachment to the strongest character in her life is understandable.

Recognising that his failed idyll in the highlands, which already drove his wife away, is now becoming a prison for Shell her dad is forced into drastic action. This is bleak but brilliant stuff; there are some moments of real light amongst the heaviness of teenage hormones struggling to make sense of the world. The camera works well to build portraits of both the people and landscape at play with constant embellishment from some superb ambient sound work. Chloe Pirrie is a gem here, catching the fragility of adolescent uncertainty married with the stubbornness to grapple and impress upon the world at large.

(3.5/5)