You wait years for a Cornish-set quasi horror film to come along, then two come along at once (kind of). Following last year’s lo-fi surprise hit Bait, which spun drama from the tensions between locals and out-of-towners, Claire Oakley’s Make Up conjures up a similar sense of unease in a completely different milieu. Set in an out-of-season caravan park, Oakley mixes coming-of-age drama, spooky surrealism and small-scale mystery into an unexpected voyage of self-realisation. Like its protagonist, it plays its cards close to its chest, throwing in red herrings and blind alleys, but creates a tangible sense of atmosphere and discomfort through clever filmmaking and a quietly absorbing lead performance by Molly Windsor.
A startlingly original debut.
Taciturn 18-year-old Ruth (Windsor) arrives at a Cornish caravan site in the dead of night looking for boyfriend-of-three-years Tom (Joseph Quinn). Early doors, Oakley deploys unsettling tactics — the sound of foxes rutting, a recurring image of a kite tethered to a pole, an empty amusement arcade that matches Blumhouse for dread — interspersed with sequences of Ruth and Tom getting reacquainted. What feels like it is going to be the plot kicks in when Ruth discovers red hairs on a jacket and begins to Jessica Fletcher her way around the site, asking questions in-between menial tasks. Her investigation brings her into the orbit of Jade (a vibrant Stefani Martini) who makes wigs out of human hair and introduces Ruth to make-up, spliffs and dancing while Tom becomes increasingly distant.
What happens next takes the film into a new zone of madness, with Ruth suffering increasingly what may or may not be hallucinations and the filmmaking taking a turn for the Expressionist, with everything becoming more dream-like and intense. It’s a slight story and leaves threads unresolved, but Oakley, along with cinematographer Nick Cooke, composer Ben Salisbury and sound designer Ania Przygoda, turns a campsite into a nightmare (fumigated caravans covered in polythene feel like crime scenes) as Ruth tries to come to terms with new desires and who she really is. The result drifts and ambles but remains a startlingly original debut.
