A teenager follows a missing friend into a dangerous world.
GOING COUNTRY is used with permission from Philip Stevens. Learn more at inceptivefilms.com.
Aahna's friend Beth has been missing for some time, and Aahna can't just let go and move forward from the disappearance. It haunts her, even well after the search for Beth stalls.
Taking matters into her own hands, Aahna decides to follow Beth's trail into the isolated Lincolnshire fenlands. There, she discovers an underworld of drugs, trafficking and exploitation, full of menacing characters and forces at work that Aahna barely understands. She gets pulled in deeper, but each clue to Beth's fate may also entrap her.
Directed by Philip Stevens from a script written by Laura Turner, this short drama is a sinister descent into a netherworld, tucked away in the East Midlands fens. The storytelling takes advantage of this stark, isolated area of England to establish a dark, almost seedy underbelly of society, cut off from the rest of the world -- a place where anyone can, and does, disappear.
There's a sense of uneasy quiet that infuses the film from beginning to end, from the unvarnished naturalism of its cinematography to the slow burn of its storytelling. Carefully observant writing and editing capture Aahna's stream of thoughts as she looks for clues to Beth's existence and whereabouts. But the most compelling source of information is her interaction with Mattei, played by actor Julian Kostov with both wariness and a slight flicker of humanity.
Actor Duaa Karim endows Aahna with a watchful intelligence and enduring loyalty to her friend that drives her to pursue her friend and go about her "investigation." But ultimately, she's still a young girl in a difficult, troubled realm. There is the abuse of bodies through drugs and exploitation, but moreover, there's a sense of the expendability of human life. This nihilism seems into the world of the film, giving it a sense of rotting torpor -- and threatening to envelop Aahna herself.
GOING COUNTRY has all the elements of a taut crime thriller, from its anxious electronic score to its evocation of a rich, hidden underworld. Its intrigue sparks plenty of questions about the background of the characters and stories that can expand into a longer feature. But like a solid character drama, it is more concerned with the inner experience of its main character. With its unwavering focus on Aahna, it is not a conventional thriller at all, but a study of a young woman's fundamental vulnerability in a milieu that sees her as just another commodity to exploit. The narrative builds up not to a shock-and-awe orchestrated by the tight choreography of plot and suspense, but a slow dawning of moral horror. The few signs of humanity may save Aahna, but any hope otherwise is fragile.
23 сен 2022
