A textbook example of how good casting lifts all boats, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning features five outstanding up-and-coming British and Irish millennial actors — Anthony Boyle, Joe Cole, Jay Lycurgo, Daryl McCormack and Lola Petticrew — at the helm of a strong ensemble alongside well-chosen supporting players and non-professionals. The core quintet play a gang of working-class friends who’ve known each other since high school but are now facing tough adult choices in economically depressed Birmingham, England. Their liquid, nervy, interlocking performances make this British director Clio Barnard’s best feature in a while, although it still doesn’t reach the high-water mark set by her haunting, innovative debut The Arbor.
Adapted by Enda Walsh (Die My Love, Small Things Like These) from a novel by Keiran Goddard, Buildings offers a hearty, quintessentially British-Irish café fry-up of gritty realism, class consciousness and masculine despair, all washed down with tannic, milky mugs of message-bearing melodrama in the tradition of Ken Loach. That sort of package usually plays well in Cannes, where this debuted in the Directors’ Fortnight strand, although the end result is ultimately a bit flat and underwhelming.
