Silver Haze Review – FilmTotaal Review

Director: Sacha Polak | Script: Sacha Polak | Cast: Vicky Knight (Franky), Esmé Creed-Miles (Florence), Charlotte Knight (Leah), Archie Brigden (Jack), Angela Bruce (Alice) ea | Time to play: 122 minutes | Year: 2022

Met dirty god Director Sacha Polak discovered a fresh acting talent, full of raw charisma and a scarred face: Vicky Knight. But the role she played, a young woman who had survived a hydrochloric acid attack, had little to do with her own story. Just to have a good excuse to work with his new muse, Polak wrote a movie that gets much closer to Knight’s personal past. It’s still fiction, but a lot of truth is filtered through it.

Franky, a nurse, continues to search after years for the person responsible for the burns she suffered as a child. She then slept in a room next to a cafe where a fire broke out during a party. In fact, she’s convinced: the woman her father left her family for must have done it. But she has no evidence and the police refuse to open the case. As this trauma unfolds, she falls in love with an injured bird, or rather: a patient.

The shared grief quickly creates a bond between Franky and the depressed Florence. They hang out together more and more, becoming more and more intimate with each other, both physically and spiritually. And they even commit something together that’s best translated as a violent crime, and then go into hiding along with a former foster mom from Florence. Nice and intimate. But two psychological traumas rarely go together for long. At some point, Franky begins to be too clingy for Florence’s liking, and Florence begins to be repulsed by him.

silver mist It’s not an easy movie, not a melodramatic plot told in a straight line, but a collection of atmospheric skits where you mostly engage with two characters who may not be at all approachable. And that demands something from the viewer. You have to invest yourself to get to this story. If you’re open to that, you’ll be rewarded twice over, because in the end there’s a lot to love about Franky and Florence.

Director Polak seems to give her star, Vicky Knight, a lot of freedom to give the character her own interpretation. And of course, Vicky and Franky are a part of each other. But someone has to dare to put that much out there in a movie role, while good acting can also require some healthy distance; Knight must dare to look at herself and form an idea about it if she wants to channel herself into a fictional character.

And in the case of Esmé Creed-Miles, who plays Florence, it’s sometimes hard not to see a younger version of her mother, actress Samantha Morton, in her looks. How unfair is that to her. Fortunately, she also displays an equally idiosyncratic acting talent, with which she is able to detach herself from the family association. Because in her hands, Florence is damaged, suicidal and raw, but at the same time an impulsive hedonist with a soft and sweet side.

But in the end it is also the characters that come to the surface and bring things to life. Also small roles as Florence’s adoptive mother, Alice, and Franky’s mother and younger sister. Something Polak also shows a keen eye on is the English underclass. silver mist it shows the working-class slums of Dagenham in an entirely appropriate social realist style. Complemented by his own penchant for gritty and abrasive visual poetry. This is taken from life.