LFF 2018: Happy New Year, Colin Burstead

Family equals chaos in the hilarious but unwieldy Happy New Year, Colin Burstead. Ben Wheatley’s latest concerns an unruly brood – three generations of them – as they gather at a posh seaside estate to see in the Bells, and the Kill List director captures their maelstrom of love and hate, compassion and resentment, in a dizzyingly fractured fashion. Laurie Rose provides the juddering, handheld camerawork that follows the huge ensemble cast as they badmouth each other and knock back booze in various rooms of the country pile, while Wheatley himself edits the images into jagged shards that cross-cut between the breakneck bickering. Clint Mansell’s spiky, slightly spooky score accentuates the tension.

Organising this ill-advised get-together is Neil Maskell’s eponymous Colin, a combustible ball of anger who seems to have little time for his family’s bullshit. When his mother (Doon Mackichan) takes a theatrical tumble on the first step as she enters the house, it’s greeted with an enormous eye-roll that suggests he’s seen this attention-seeking act a million times before. He has even less sympathy for his old man (Bill Paterson), who comes cap-in-hand to Colin – who’s clearly flush – after losing his shirt on a scheme cooked up by David (Sam Riley), the black sheep of the family. When third sibling Gini (Hayley Squires) confesses she’s taken the initiative to invite this prodigal son to the party, it becomes clear where the spark is going to come from in this powderkeg of a gathering.

There are plenty of other guests too – far too many of them, in fact, including talented actors like Joe Cole and Peter Ferdinando in lightly sketched roles. Few manage to make much of an impression in the frenzy, but even with the more interesting players, their stories feel underdeveloped and unnecessary. There’s a transvestite uncle (Charles Dance) who has some news to break to the family but never gets the chance to make his speech. The nervous lord of the manor who’s clearly aghast that this low-class rabble are in his family home gets a few laughs but he's entirely AWOL from the middle of the movie. A shameless gatecrasher (Asim Chaudhry) making a last dash attempt to win back his ex (Sarah Baxendale), who’s providing the party's catering/opening the M&S canapes, gets some toe-curling laughs too, but his pathetic attempts at wooing her back only distract from the meat of the family conflict.

There’s shades of Mike Leigh in Wheatley’s escalating tragicomedy and also the means by which Happy New Year, Colin Burstead was produced, with the script partly improvised by the cast. What’s missing is Leigh’s laserlike focus, with several characters lost in the melee and the collaborative dialogue and scenarios rarely delivering the emotional punch that’s initially promised. One exception is when David croons a croaky apology to his mother in a piano ballad he’s wrote specially, which manages to be both sweetly tender and hilariously manipulative all at once. Word is, however, that Wheatley is developing the Bursteads' family troubles into a TV series. With more room to breathe, this sweary soap opera is one we’d happily binge.

---

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead had its world premiere at London Film Festival, and screens on the BBC this Christmas

For more London Film Festival coverage, click here