Access All Areas

Contrived teen drama filmed at last year’s Bestival festival on the Isle of Wight

Film Review by Rachel Bowles | 03 Jul 2017
Film title: Access All Areas
Director: Bryn Higgins
Starring: Ella Purnell, Edward Bluemel, Georgie Henley, Jordan Stephens, Nigel Lindsay, Jo Hartley, Jason Flemyng
Release date: 20 Oct
Certificate: 15

It’s the end of summer in Bristol, and school and university looms for some. Mia (Ella Purnell, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children) has recently lost her mother to cancer and refuses to talk to her rageaholic father, Mack (Nigel Lindsay), or her childhood friend, Heath (Edward Bluemel).

But Heath has his own host of problems: he’s on probation for an undisclosed offence, he’s a singer-songwriter who can’t perform, and his mother, Libby (Jo Hartley), recently tried to commit suicide and doesn’t like to be left alone. Heath’s best friend, Leon (Jordan Stephens, one half of Rizzle Kicks), is about to leave for uni and is determined to get Heath a gig before he goes.

Mia, knowing that her mother played the festival Isle of Songs, steals Heath’s moped and heads with best mate Natalie (Georgie Henley, The Narnia Chronicles) to the music festival, with Heath and Leon not far behind. Mack is furious; blaming Heath and rounding up poor Libby, he hits the road, determined to track the teenagers down and bring them home. Meanwhile, reclusive, legendary artist Kurtz is rumoured to be playing the festival, his first gig in over a decade.

Filmed at last year’s Bestival on the Isle of Wight, Access All Areas makes the most of the naturally cinematic spectacle of festival crowds plus a host of carnivalesque figures – actors as woodland creatures, fire-eaters and acrobats. These bright, vivid aesthetics, however, are too often let down by poor storytelling. Director Bryn Higgins tries to frame the festival as an escapist wonderland, a magical place free from the constraints of everyday life and its mundanities, though somehow rooted in the reality of contemporary, commercialised festival culture. It’s not necessarily an impossible feat but Higgins can’t manage it here, so the fairytale, dreamlike logic of the festival often feels contrived.

More simply, however, basic storytelling rules like “show don’t tell” are often broken, and characterisation is slim to none, giving us little reason to feel invested in Mia or Heath. Their charismatic, funny sidekicks Natalie and Leon shine in comparison, with Henley and Stephens doing well with what little they’re given.

The parents, similarly, are too broadly drawn and never really seem to grow from their respective stereotypical archetypes – the overprotective, borderline abusive father and the fragile hippy mother who has become a burden to her son (both learn their lessons by getting high in the woods).

Access All Areas may achieve success among those too young to have gone to their first festival, as they should be wide-eyed enough as a result to forgive its faults. It may struggle to find that audience given its sex and drug jokes, though they’re likely to go over the heads of tweeners.


Access All Areas had its world premiere at EIFF 2017