Edge of Summer review – Cornish coming-of-age tale keeps its terrible secrets close | Film

Here is a dreamy, drifting film, directed by Lucy Cohen, set on the Cornish coast in the long distant pre-smartphone summer of 1991. It’s unevenly presented sometimes and not everything here works, yet it is interesting for its atmospheric use of location and images, its tonal shifts and a disconnect between the ostensible reality of what’s happening and the feeling that certain parts are a hallucination, a psychopathological symptom of trauma, or a remembered dream.

The scene is a wild and rocky coastline where Yvonne (Josie Walker) has arrived for a restorative break at a rented cottage with her quiet 11-year-old daughter Evie (Flora Hylton); Evie’s dad is not with them and Yvonne is apparently taking a break from her marriage. She has assured shy, sensitive Evie that during this tricky time they can hang out together, but Evie is horrified that a man friend of her mum’s has shown up, the creepy and obnoxiously flirtatious Tony (Steffan Rhodri). Yvonne evasively tries to give the impression this was somehow unexpected, but Evie correctly suspects that her mum has more or less engineered this highly unwelcome event. Deeply upset, Evie forms a friendship with Adam (Joel Sefton-longi), a boy of her age also missing his dad, who has evidently walked out on the family. But his mum Debbie (Nichola Burley) is keeping secrets about this from Adam, and Adam is keeping a secret from her.

The growing relationship between Evie and Adam becomes very strange indeed when he takes her down the disused tin mine and they hear disturbing ghostly sounds. Is this a ghost story? It’s not clear. The apparently terrifying developments do not proceed or escalate in ways you might expect. Evie just glumly accepts them as another unwanted and disagreeable thing that is happening on this awful holiday.

And the tone jars shockingly into something else when she comes back to the cottage to find her mum in bed with Tony: a painful, even brutally explicit revelation. So what is she to make of the weird visits to the deserted tin mine, and what are we, the audience, to make of them? Especially given that they are bafflingly succeeded by daylit scenes of normality, to which Evie has evidently returned from below ground without mishap. There is no flash-forward to some present perspective to question what has happened, no indication from a narrative voiceover that what we have seen is a metaphor or a delusion. And yet the strangeness persists. Not perfect, this, but interesting.

Here is a dreamy, drifting film, directed by Lucy Cohen, set on the Cornish coast in the long distant pre-smartphone summer of 1991. It’s unevenly presented sometimes and not everything here works, yet it is interesting for its atmospheric use of location and images, its tonal shifts and a disconnect between the ostensible reality of what’s happening and the feeling that certain parts are a hallucination, a psychopathological symptom of trauma, or a remembered dream.

The scene is a wild and rocky coastline where Yvonne (Josie Walker) has arrived for a restorative break at a rented cottage with her quiet 11-year-old daughter Evie (Flora Hylton); Evie’s dad is not with them and Yvonne is apparently taking a break from her marriage. She has assured shy, sensitive Evie that during this tricky time they can hang out together, but Evie is horrified that a man friend of her mum’s has shown up, the creepy and obnoxiously flirtatious Tony (Steffan Rhodri). Yvonne evasively tries to give the impression this was somehow unexpected, but Evie correctly suspects that her mum has more or less engineered this highly unwelcome event. Deeply upset, Evie forms a friendship with Adam (Joel Sefton-longi), a boy of her age also missing his dad, who has evidently walked out on the family. But his mum Debbie (Nichola Burley) is keeping secrets about this from Adam, and Adam is keeping a secret from her.

The growing relationship between Evie and Adam becomes very strange indeed when he takes her down the disused tin mine and they hear disturbing ghostly sounds. Is this a ghost story? It’s not clear. The apparently terrifying developments do not proceed or escalate in ways you might expect. Evie just glumly accepts them as another unwanted and disagreeable thing that is happening on this awful holiday.

And the tone jars shockingly into something else when she comes back to the cottage to find her mum in bed with Tony: a painful, even brutally explicit revelation. So what is she to make of the weird visits to the deserted tin mine, and what are we, the audience, to make of them? Especially given that they are bafflingly succeeded by daylit scenes of normality, to which Evie has evidently returned from below ground without mishap. There is no flash-forward to some present perspective to question what has happened, no indication from a narrative voiceover that what we have seen is a metaphor or a delusion. And yet the strangeness persists. Not perfect, this, but interesting.