Working-class community warfare is laid bare in this starkly captured feature debut from Fyzal Boulifa. At its epicentre are best friends Lynn (Roxanne Scrimshaw)) and Lucy (Nichola Burley), the former a dutiful, meek family woman who had her daughter in her teens, the latter reminiscent of Bria Vinaite in The Florida Project, with her aquamarine hair and silver puffa jacket fronting as vivacity, yet a deep fear of responsibility lurks close to the surface. Boulifa cast Scrimshaw from the streets to play Lynn, and her captivatingly stoic debut performance more than holds its own against Burley’s more seasoned one.
We join the pair as Lucy learns the ropes of motherhood while sparring with her younger, feckless partner, and Lynn secures a bottom-rung job at a local hair salon and endures a passionless marriage at home. A night out confirms that Lucy’s brimming confidence dominates the friendship, with Lynn loyally at hand to smooth out her erratic tendencies. Their bond — branded with matching heart tattoos — seems concrete at first. Then, a horrific development upends the balance; Lucy is left alone and unstable, and Lynn enjoys new validation as her fickle, bloodthirsty colleagues coax her further into the fold.
The plot moves swiftly, and Boulifa’s script leaves motives largely unexplored as the friendship plummets to new depths. Judgement instead is placed in the hands of the town’s inhabitants, who voluntarily fuel the feud with a tabloid brand of mob mentality (“There are just some people who should never reproduce,” sneers one neighbour who shares viral videos of violent parenting on her Facebook page). When the film arrives at its most polarising moments — complemented by Taina Galis’ bright but sparsely framed cinematography — Lynn + Lucy deftly highlights the fragile fabric of a community boxed in by its self-imposed sense of justice, and the desperate, damaging behaviour drawn out by scandal.