Like Morrissey, Oliver is flawed and at times difficult to like, but there’s something so inherently genuine about the character that he’s identifiable and easy to empathise with his self-narrated journey mixing self-deprecating humour, harsh realities and fantasy elements to reinforce he is a person worth rooting for. The key settings of Oliver’s home and school juxtapose this with a blatantly clean and almost impersonal aesthetic that comes to represent the adulthood awaiting this pretentious teenager in his poster-laden bedroom filled with props like typewriters and cassette players, just in case you’d forgotten that he’s the second coming of Morrissey. The quietly established setting of 80s Swansea provides some visually stunning backdrops, the scenery of which is referenced directly by the lead as ‘making him feel nothing’ and is subsequently pushed to one side as roaming shots of his favoured walks by a dock or on the beach take its place, the autumnal hills instead being referenced only as notes of displeasure from there on out. It is in his misfiring quest to solve such issues and bring about the most solace to himself that the story moves forward, introducing parents Jill (Hawkins) and Lloyd (Taylor) as well as manic pixie dream girl Jordana, the sort alternative, Doc Martens wearing teenager who deals with a crush by insulting them and is played pitch perfectly by Yasmin Paige. It is the sound of our melancholic youth, a bright spot in the tragedy of our own ordinariness and an ode to the want-to-be intellectual in each of us a film with the type of honesty, flair and quietly humourous tone we can each only wish for our own life stories, and a bloody good watch at that.Ĭraig Roberts is a revelation as bumbling intellectual misfit teenager Oliver Tate, a 15 year old school pupil with a talent for accidentally falling into problems both way larger than he can truly comprehend and way less meaningful than he may first assume, something each of us can identify with should we search our true selves for long enough. Richard Ayoade’s darkly humourous adaptation of Joe Dunthorpe’s coming of age novel Submarine is a movie that feels like a song by The Smiths wrapped in the sort of self-aware cinematic tropes that paint a picture of teenage nothingness as if it is most special and unique in its intricacies. Starring: Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige, Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor, Paddy Considine
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