18/05/2013 - Paul Wright signs a first feature film, formally very inventive, about a descent into the bleakest depths of psychological distress

"One day, the devil of the ocean cursed the town and all its inhabitants. Everyone was afraid and everyone was sad. It seemed as if darkness would reign forever. The people knew that the devil had to be caught for everything to return to normal". In opening his first feature film, For Those In Peril [+see also:
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film profile], presented in competition in the Critics' Week at the 66th Cannes Film Festival, with these whispered words from a fairytale and images of waves breaking on the rocks, English director Paul Wright makes no mystery of the dramatic nature of the tale which is about to unfold.

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Centered around a young man disorientated by nature, a state aggravated by his status as the sole survivor of a fatal shipwreck which had traumatised a small fishing town in Scotland, the film describes a vertiginous descent into the bleakest depths of madness. In total despair after losing his elder brother (who was also his protector) in the abysses and while nurturing the fond hope of miraculously finding him again, the protagonist, Aaron (a remakable and omnipresent George MacKay), gradually becomes the scapegoat for the catastrophe in the eyes of the community ("Why did he survive rather than the others?", "We want to get on with our lives, but every time we see him, we plunge back into the past"). The stangeness of his personality ("You'd think he was in a world apart, he's never grown up", "You're not only crazy, you live on another planet") and his silence about the circumstances of the drama foster their rancour and suspicions ("You had no place being on the boats", "Some say you wanted to get rid of your brother"). A heavy atmosphere which isolates Aaron even more, before hatred rears its head ("You Jonas bastard, you should never have come back") together with the inhabitants' fear when his heartrending sorrow finds no other release than to carry out the absurd wish of his inner voice: to find the monster of the ocean (from a fairytale his mother used to tell him when he was young) who he is fiercely convinced took away his brother, and liberate the drowned men, so that everything could be as before… A "demented" programme which he cannot be persuaded to drop by the only two people to show him any affection, his mother (Kate Dickie) and his brother's former girl-friend (Nichola Burley).

The subject of madness is not new to the cinema, but Paul Wright succeeds in approaching it in an original way and by portraying its chaotic dimension very convincingly thanks to an interlacing of images from a multitude of different sources: a shoulderheld camera and grainy shots to follow Aaron in his solitary wanderings, a TV report recounting the drama, family video archives showing the childhood of Aaron and his brother, shots from cell phones, almost hallucinatory flashbacks to painful incidents in Aaron's past with the other rather rough youngsters in the village etc… This visual patchwork, mounted with considerable brio by the Danish duo Michael Aglund - Anders Refn (Breaking the Waves, Antichrist [+see also:
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(Translated from French)