Edge Of Summer

Films about childhood, aimed at adult viewers, have to speak effectively to memory. Lucy Cohen’s Edge Of Summer is a wonderfully sensual film full of the details that might pull one back into a remembered world: the edge of a lace curtain blowing against the sill. The sunlight on a patch of ceiling. The sharp, clear blue of the sea. One can almost smell the salt air, the bruised grass, the slightly musty odour of a holiday cottage just opened up early in the season. Evie (Flora Hylton) and her mother Yvonne (Josie Walker) were supposed to be going there to get some time together, just the two of them, but the sudden arrival of Tony (Steffan Rhodri), in whom her mother has an obvious sexual interest, crushes that hope. The resulting feelings of betrayal and abandonment are also the kind of things that linger over time.

Evie was still hoping that her parents would get back together – overhearing scraps of conversation, we will soon learn that that’s not going to happen, but not for the reason she thinks. Tony’s presence is an affront, as is the suggestion that she just run on down to the village and find some children to play with. Many viewers may remember having been dismissed like this when the holidays they’d been encouraged to look forward to turned out to be more about their parents’ own desires. Friends are no more interchangeable at that age than they are later in life, which adults tend to forget. Finding a welcome isn’t easy – and yet Evie catches the eye of local boy Adam (Joel Sefton-Iongi), and despite the ineptness of his overtures, they find themselves hanging out together.

Adam is reluctant to talk about himself. He seems to be surrounded by mysteries, and it’s difficult to tell how much that stems from a desire to impress and how much is about something else. His father is absent too. He spends a fair bit of his time helping out his mum and looking after his little sister Dawn (Skyer Dennett), who has a Tinkerbell fixation and keeps trying to persuade him to be her Peter Pan, something which becomes unsettling as ghostly themes develop in the background of the film. When not busy with that, he likes to spend his time tresspassing in the old mine where his father used to work, but which has now been shut down. When he takes Evie there, the two of them have a scary experience which immediately binds them together and launches them on an unexpected journey of discovery.

Set as it is in Cornwall, and full of local character, the film makes use of the long-established folklore of the knockers – sometimes described as a form of piskie, here as the ghosts of dead miners, in either case knocking on the walls of the mine in order to warn working miners about the risk of cave-ins. It also explores the clash between the idyllic holiday image and the realities of village life, where petty jealousies and the cruelty of people who have no other way to fill their time add salt to existing wounds. As the film’s themes darken, so do the initially bright landscapes, and the colours of Evie’s clothes fade. This creates something of a sense that the characters are slipping backwards into a troubled past.

Mark Lawes’ excellent sound work contributes to the immersive quality of the film, sometimes terrifying, sometimes helping to illustrate the way the children are at risk of becoming emotionally overwhelmed. in the course of all this, Evie will celebrate her 12th birthday. She right on the brink of adulthood, sometimes feeling like the most mature person in the house, sometimes frighteningly vulnerable. Yvonne, caught up in her own concerns, hasn’t noticed this, and continues to treat her like an infant, which makes all the tensions between them worse. As she tries to help Adam deal with his problems, and face her own fears about what’s happening locally, Evie must also find a way to overcome the communication problems within her family.

Lovingly crafted, with a fine performance from Hylton and a real sense of how hard life at that age is for many people, Edge Of Summer mingles elements of the supernatural with mundane but nonetheless potent tragedies. The mine, always lurking just out of sight, becomes a dark unknown through which the children must pass if they hope to rediscover the light.