In Fyzal Boulifa’s fiercely impressive feature debut, set on an Essex housing estate, two childhood
Friends try to navigate adult lives that turn toxic
Fyzal Boulifa is a young
British director of Moroccan heritage who was Bafta-nominated for his short film The Curse and now makes his fiercely impressive feature debut with Lynn + Lucy, a gruelling social-realist tragedy with a batsqueak of horror, set on a tough Essex estate that Boulifa says is not so very different from where he was brought up in Leicester.
It’s a film about class, community, self-esteem and female friendship and how desperate unhappiness can be incubated in secret, like bacilli in an unseen petri dish. Lynn + Lucy is Loachian in its way (Ken Loach’s company Sixteen Films is a co-producer) and is also indebted to a later generation of film-makers; it feels like Clio Barnard’s The Arbor, her verbatim cinema experiment set on Bradford’s Buttershaw estate, and there is also the almost dream-like passion of early Lynne Ramsay pictures like Morvern Callar or Ratcatcher.