Better Things

Heroin seeps through the empty lives of the kids in a rural Cotswold village in this quiet, desolate drama by Duane Hopkins
"Nothing" is the word which forms both the entry and the exit to Duane Hopkins' woozy analysis of smack-induced nihilism, a film about the need to feel nothing when everything is at stake. It's followed by a weary line taken from the novelist Miranda Lee. "This was real life, and real was difficult, at best". Emptiness is a defining property for the characters in Better Things whose title suggests an irony absent from the grim events unfolding in a smack-stricken Cotswold village. Here the accumulation of empty days which make up empty lives in England's empty places is plugged by drugs which - depending on how you look at it - are either fatally efficient or hopelessly useless. Hopkins' multi-stranded film, set in the area where the writer-director grew up and acted by a mostly non-professional cast, follows two distinct sections of this unreported community. Here are the kids: Rob (Liam Mcllfatrick) is a pale and gentle heroin user whose girlfriend Tess (Emma Cooper) has just died from an overdose. Sarah (Tara Ballard) is a student who returns home to the village from college. She and her boyfriend David (Che Corr) are heavy users but like all these kids in the film's early stages, they respect the invisible tripwire that exists between smoking smack and injecting. Larry (Kurt Taylor) is an angry, jealous school kid whose ex Rachel (Megan Palmer) is now going out with someone else. And Gail (Rachel McIntyre) sits at home reading books in bed, imprisoned not by addiction but by her agoraphobic fear of the world outside. Just as these teenagers are trying to make sense of where they are and where they're going, so the village's elderly are trying to understand where they've been and what is to come. Death is the gauge against which all these lives are measured out. Gail's grandmother (Patricia Loveland) returns from hospital to the family home and she hasn't got long to go. Rob has a mate called Jon (Freddie Cunliffe) whose grandfather (Frank Bench) is also released from hospital, but Mr Gladwin won't talk to his wife (Betty Bench) because he's haunted by the memory - or is it a more recent discovery? - of some undisclosed betrayal in the past. Hopkins portrays the kids' drug use in a matter-of-fact manner that owes nothing to the jittery whizz of Trainspotting or the sleazy European allure of Christiane F. Better Things, with its hazy silences in parents' frontrooms, its aimless car journeys through the functional countryside and a palette like a week-old bruise, recreates the deadness and distance associated with opiate psychosis. Drug use here has nothing to do with partying or sex, though there is a strangely sensual tone running through the film which suggests there may be a more obscure erotic aspect to the prick of the needle. Instead Hopkins' film treads through a barren and colourless landscape where what matters is, in every sense, hard to tell. It's a territory previously explored - though never quite so intimately - by Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher, Andrea Arnold's Red Road, and the films of the Flemish director Bruno Dumont, whose blankly-toned La Vie De Jesus tracked a similar sense of enervated ennui among the teenagers of rural Flanders. The non-professional actors, some of whom Hopkins' simply approached on the streets of Shipston On Stour in Gloucestershire, are extraordinarily natural as they move slowly through the film, and their appearance is distressingly authentic. Pin-prick eyes float in sunken sockets which look like they've taken hit after hit, the graduation from smoking to injecting acknowledged by one character with the quiet observation, "Have you noticed he's stopped wearing T-shirts?" Among Hopkins' many great triumphs in this demanding yet rewarding film is his refusal to get bogged down in issues, or to suggest there are answers to the questions which these kids can barely articulate. Better Things stands right on the very edge of the British tradition of naturalism: it has the air of dirty realism but it's also extremely artful. Sudden dropouts and switches in the sound design introduce an anxious sense of failing focus. Strands connect, then disconnect, as do the characters themselves. The blue-grey wash which seeps over everything, the eerie ambience and the characters' slow slide into oblivion suggests an episode of Chris Morris' 'Jam' rewritten as outright tragedy. Brilliantly assembled and shot, hushed and grimly haunting, this strange journey into England's heart of darkness is as far from a conventional drug film as is possible, but it's that acknowledgement of the banality of addiction, combined with Hopkins' quiet sensitivity to these characters, that makes Better Things so powerfully and appallingly memorable.
Verdict Bleak yet powerful, hushed yet haunting, this is an extraordinary portrait of lives dissolving away into nothing in the chilly English countryside.