Carol Morley's 2011 documentary Dreams of a Life, about a London woman's lonely bedsit demise, was a haunting portrait of the individual in an atomised society.
The film's achievement was born of careful research, hard work and an instinct for a good story – sadly, the qualities notably absent in this feeble drama of depression. At a snowbound hotel on the British coast, various loners and losers have come to hide away, or else do themselves in. Maxine Peake leads the cast as a woman who thinks she may have killed her friend, though her reasoning on the matter is, like everything else, unintelligible. The script requires infinitely more subtlety, and the actors require more rehearsal. Shoddy stuff from a film-maker plainly capable of better.
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