Starring: Jodie Whittaker, Alice Lowe, Edward Hogg, Lorraine Asbourne
Adult Life Skills
Director: Rachel Tunnard
Rating: 4/5
Adult Life Skills is a movie that has been lighting up the festival circuit and sees Rachel Tunnard making her feature film directorial debut.
Written and directed by Tunnard, the movie is a feature-length version of her Bafta-nominated short film Emotional Fusebox. Tunnard is one of a range of female director's making their debuts this year and she really is a filmmaker to keep an eye on going forward.
Anna is stuck: she's approaching 30, living like a hermit in her mum's garden shed and wondering why the suffragettes ever bothered. She spends her days making videos using her thumbs as actors - thumbs that bicker about things like whether Yogi Bear is a moral or existential nihilist. But Anna doesn't show these videos to anyone and no one knows what they are for.
A week before her birthday her Mum serves her an ultimatum - she needs to move out of the shed, get a haircut that doesn't put her gender in question and stop dressing like a homeless teenager. Naturally, Anna tells her Mum to BACK THE F-OFF.
However, when her school friend comes to visit, Anna's self-imposed isolation becomes impossible to maintain. Soon she is entangled with a troubled eight-year-old boy obsessed with Westerns, and the local estate agent whose awkward interpersonal skills continually undermine his attempts to seduce her.
Adult Life Skills is one of the best British films that you will see this year as Tunnard paints an intimate and heart-breaking portrait of grief and how we all cope differently with it.
I have always been a big fan of Jodie Whittaker and she delivers another terrific performance as Anna, a young woman who is struggling after the death of her twin. Anna is a slightly off the wall character and Whittaker strikes the perfect balance between heartbreak and humour.
Yes, Adult Life Skills may be a movie that explores grief, but it is not a film that is all doom and gloom. Instead, Tunnard has weaved a funny and charming movie that is driven by this emotional core.
And it is this emotional string to the story that really does pack the greatest punch as all of Anna's relationships suffer as she tries to make sense of everything - especially her relationship with her mother.
Lorraine Ashbourne is also terrific as a mother who is also grieving but it trying to make her daughter see that she needs to move forward with her life. Together, Asbourne and Whittaker deliver some of the film's best and most emotionally powerful moments.
Tunnard has already won the Nora Ephron prize for best female director at the Tribeca Film Festival for her work on this film, and she is a director that I am excited to see develop over the next couple of years.
If you are a fan of British film, Adult Life Skills is a movie that you cannot afford to miss this weekend as it is a terrific watch that is driven by a wonderful central performance from Whittaker.
Adult Life Skills is out now.
Tagged in Jodie Whittaker