Mostly British Film Fest: Bait

Mark Jenkins’ debut drama is weird. It is also strange, rather wonderful and very different. Set in a Cornish fishing village in decline, Martin Ward is a cove fisherman down on his luck, incensed by the tourist invasion transforming the village and by his brother Stephen using their father’s fishing boat for tourist excursions. Their family home has also been lost to tourists. But stylistically this everyday narrative shot in black-and-white on 16mm film, becomes an expressionistic F W Murnau melodrama with huge grainy close-ups reminiscent of early cinema generating a sense of menace and danger which foreshadow the tragedy to come. UK 2019 (89 minutes) https://youtu.be/ZmydSyiR59o