★★★★✰
Two estranged siblings are forced to confront their traumatic family past on a reluctant trek through the beautiful Kent countryside in Gates. Ben Faulkner reviews.
Sibling relationships are no easy things to capture: they are constantly messy, unpredictable, and shaped by the inevitable fractures and bonds that appear when you grow up alongside somebody. With his latest film, Gates, Josh Pickup is less interested in how these broken relationships initially form, and more concerned with how people try to put those pieces back together once they grow. Derek Cianfrance and the Duplass brothers are cited as influences, but Gates ends up feeling distinct in its own shape of heartfelt naturalism.
Pickup selects a very undomestic setting to explore his family drama. A dejected 17-year-old, Ella, (Lily Walbeoffe) is reluctantly taken on a tour of Kent’s endless countryside by her older sister, Grace (Iona Champain), who takes to the ‘trip’ with a half-resentful sense of responsibility. There is always the sense that something more exists of this spiky relationship: their empathy blocked by a knot between them. And as their traumatic past comes to the surface, the knot unravels, and with this we watch them learn to love, hate, and tolerate each other.
Set against charming acoustic numbers—including a Nick Mulvey needle drop that, for a moment, made me feel 16 again—Josh Pickup’s touching sibling drama is raw and direct. Its dialogue barely ever feels like dialogue—more like genuine exchanges between actors who understand the film beyond the materiality of a script. Gates feels acoustic itself. The results are perhaps unsurprising when you learn that Champain and Walbeoffe spent four days living together prior to the shoot; they studied their characters intensely, and from this the dialogue became pretty much wholly improvised. And yet, you still sense the careful control Pickup has on the narrative: its hyper-naturalism never becomes incoherent.
This is largely because Gates is remarkably patient for a film that only runs 40-minutes long. Liam Bracey’s cinematography buries the protagonists in lonely wide shots of Kent’s countryside—the scenery is equal parts serene and deserted, and in that there is a tension. Amidst the film’s very natural stillness there is also a tenderness: a fragility between the protagonists that threatens to crack at any moment. Beyond being important for the plot, the countryside becomes a necessary facilitator for how the drama unfolds because the characters have nobody but each other to interact with.
They are free and untethered in this rural expanse, but simultaneously trapped in each other’s company. It only works because of the strength of the performances at its centre. And ultimately, despite all of the impressive work the crew are clearly doing behind the camera, in a two-hander such as this so much of the film’s quality will rely on its two leads. Luckily for everyone, Champain and Walbeoffe buzz around the frame as if their place in Pickup’s world were inevitable. We never learn too many tangible facts about the lives of either Ella or Grace, but both actors find the most naturally human ways to breathe life into their characters, even when the scene revolves entirely around a can of peach slices.
When Gates is not moving you or tempting you to confront ghosts of your own faded family trauma, it’s coaxing a smile. Champain and Walbeoffe’s chemistry appears so organically that you find yourself laughing with them. Not at anything distinctly comedic, but laughing as if you are there, with them, helping to put up a tent or throwing berries into each other’s mouths. It becomes a wholly involving piece of work that persuades us to invest in a relationship that we are deliberately kept from learning too much about.
Despite the family mess it portrays, the film ultimately handles itself with poise. The sisters are often framed smartly in two-shots, even when bickering. By the film’s end we are left with the sense that Pickup believes, despite it all, siblings are bound to be together. What at first separates them may later be the very same thing that brings them together.
The Verdict
Strong performances and a commitment to sincere naturalism sets Josh Pickup’s work apart. Sibling relationships are hard to put into words, but Gates makes a poignant effort at putting them into cinema.
Words by Ben Faulkner
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