THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.
by Jarrod Jones. Sacha Polak’s Silver Haze is a gauntlet of hurt and no mistake. The people who live here have suffered, and sometimes they make other people suffer, a defense mechanism that deliberately leaves scars. Silver Haze is occasionally hard to watch because the miseries caught on screen feel tangible. At times, it can be frustrating.
Is that a compliment? I think so. Polak has pulled off a tricky thing: she’s assembled together a drama that taps into the contradictory sensation of wanting to be alone and wanting anything else but that, the kind that makes certain people impossible to deal with. It’s captivating to watch Franky (Vicky Knight) and Florence (Esmé Creed-Miles) attempt to let their burgeoning relationship grow even as they sabotage their happiness. I don’t recall ever wanting an onscreen couple to break things off this viscerally before. They’re terrible for each other.
Life doesn’t bring Franky and Florence together so much as smash them into intimacy. When we first meet Franky, she’s not even sure she’s gay. (“I don’t go for girls!” she informs her sister, Leah, played by Charlotte Knight.) When she first meets Florence, it’s because she’s her nurse. Florence has tried to kill herself. Franky gets the impression she might do it again. Yet something inside these two draws them to one another, a magnetism deeper than physical attraction. They’re both deeply unhappy. Being together makes shouldering their burdens easier for a time. Until it doesn’t.
Polak’s gorgeously shot film (shouts to DoP Tibor Dingelstad) begins with Franky sifting through the psychological remains of a fire that occurred when she was a little girl. She’s furious at her father for abandoning his family after this tragedy, leaving her, Leah, and their mother to carry on without him as he begins a happier life with the woman with whom he’d been having an affair. His new wife may have had something to do with the fire, an additional source of drama for the film that feels superfluous and showy; thankfully, Polak keeps these more salacious details at a distance. (Another minor plot development sees Leah develop a sudden fascination with Islam — possibly triggered by Franky’s absence later in the story — and is also distracting, directionless, one character detail too many.)
As a burn survivor, Franky’s made the most of a bad situation: she’s used her experiences to become a trained healthcare assistant, but her fraught home life means Franky’s on-call all day every day. Sometimes, her mother, an alcoholic, wakes her up in the middle of the night weeping. Franky attends to her bath in one scene, and, watching how her mother shakes with grief, you get the impression that this has happened many times before. You wonder what kind of burdens mom isn’t sharing with her family and why. Silver Haze works best when it’s grappling with small heartbreaking details like that.
When Florence crashes into Franky, the cruel reaction among her family sends her packing from East London to Southend, where Franky shacks up with Florence, her autistic brother, and her ailing but vibrant grandmother, Alice (Angela Bruce). Alice’s quiet, respectful home lets Franky let go of her anger for a time. Here, Polak explores the possibility of what a happy life might look like for her while threatening the certainty of it at every turn: Florence bristles at Franky’s familiarity with Alice; Alice is dying of cancer (yet lives each day with a warm, inviting laugh); and the fury that has so long defined Franky’s life is provoked by shitheel blokes around London who don’t approve of her relationship with Florence. Then there’s Florence herself, whose impulsive artistic side refuses to be corralled by Franky’s love and is the source of much consternation.
Silver Haze isn’t just a good excuse for Polak to work with Vicky Knight again after their first well-praised collaboration (2019’s Dirty God); it’s a proper vehicle for Knight to tell a personal story. Her character works at a local hospital, as Knight does when she’s not acting. Franky’s scars are Knight’s scars; the hurt that comes with them feels real because it is. Knight isn’t a professional actor; her choices aren’t made in some learned attempt to inhabit a character. Vicky Knight is Franky, and Franky is Vicky Knight. Her naturalism grounds Silver Haze even when the film veers into cliché.
One last thought. Esmé Creed-Miles so resembles her mother, Samantha Morton, it’s uncanny. There’s a moment where she’s bathed in neon light and glitter, dreamily moving to a piece of electronic music, her character hiding from the terrible truths about life. Watching it, you’d be forgiven for thinking Polak’s film had shifted briefly into a scene from Morvern Callar, Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 film, which starred Morton. It didn’t — and the character Creed-Miles is tasked with realizing is less complicated and somehow more grating than Morvern ever was — but it’s hard not to see the scene as Polak showing her appreciation for Ramsay and her work. I appreciate the appreciation.
6.5 / 10
Silver Haze hits select theaters on March 1 and VOD on March 12.
Written and directed by Sacha Polak.
Cinematography by Tibor Dingelstad.
Starring Vicky Knight, Esmé Creed-Miles, Charlotte Knight, Archie Brigden, and Angela Bruce.
Produced by Marleen Slot and Michael Elliott.
Not rated. Contains sex, drugs, and emotional turmoil.
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