Black Pond

A tiny cult is growing around this bewitching British oddity. It's a strange, disorientating mock-documentary about a middle-class family who are accused of murder. Their apparent 'victim' is an odd stranger who the father (Chris Langham, the disgraced star of The Thick Of It) meets while walking his three-legged dog next to a local pond. A melancholic Langham is wonderfully underplayed, in contrast to comedian Simon Amstell's overpoweringly wacky psychotherapist. The first feature by twentysomethings Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley, it scored several awards and a Bafta nomination - not bad for a self-distributed debut made for just £25,000.

Black Pond: Chris Langham was our ideal casting choice

Young directors Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe's debut feature-length film starred Chris Langham in his first role after prison. They explain to Daisy Bowie-Sell why casting him was the best possible decision.

Something in the water

It's brilliant. It's recognisably a British take on suburban, middle-class manners and media exploitation, and the familiar if unusually-cast faces of Chris Langham and Simon Amstell also give you something to go on, but Black Pond is not your average film.

Black Pond is sinister, silly and seriously interesting

Sinister and sometimes silly but also seriously interesting. This quintessentially British oddity marks its young creators as ones to watch.

What an intriguing, and unsettling little movie Black Pond (2011, Black Pond, 15) is. At the Baftas its makers (director Tom Kingsley, writer/director Will Sharpe and producer Sarah Brocklehurst) were nominated for an outstanding debut award, and there is plenty here to suggest that they are an ever-so-slightly surreal force to be reckoned with. The story of a family who unwittingly achieve tabloid notoriety as a killer clan, the film mixes faux documentary interviews with off-kilter (and carefully coloured) scenes from a waking dream of life, interspersed with animated legends of lost ladies of the lake and three-legged dogs. It's peculiar stuff, occasionally funny, often poignantly uncomfortable, and consistently weird, like some subdued English relative of David Lynch's American gothic oeuvre. Chris Langham and Amanda Hadingue provide a suitably awkward mainstay as the collapsing couple at the centre of the drama, although Simon Amstell appears occasionally to have wandered in from a different (and more overtly comedic) movie as a madcap phoney shrink taunting Sharpe's mockable Tim. Extras include deleted scenes and the Sharpe/Kingsley short film Cockroach.

DVD: Black Pond (15)

Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe's low-budget debut is haunting, moving and very funny.

Black Pond: DVD review

This melancholy, bleakly funny black comedy, about a bickering family plunged into notoriety by an act of kindness, has a dexterity and formal sophistication that belie its micro-budget (£25,000) and its status as a debut film.

Black Pond review

Funny and surprisingly moving, this languidly surreal comedy cross-fertilises Mike Leigh and Chris Morris. It also rehabilitates the wonderfully lugubrious Langham's career.

There's an element of chutzpah in Black Pond, the opening scenes of which feature disgraced actor Chris Langham reflecting on a scandal that has resulted in his character being splashed across the tabloids. Cutting close to the bone, it's the sort of thing that could easily have backfired had the ensuing film not been such an accomplished, well-observed and refreshingly oddball work. Put that down to the performances and to first-time directors Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe, whose ability to mix the comedy of extreme discomfort with astute insights into contemporary middle-class mores takes the film in surprising directions. That's important, because the film reveals at the outset the nature of the scandal that has tainted the brilliantly named Tom Thomson (Langham) and his family. What follows is a sort of mock-doc reconstruction of the events preceding it, with after-the-fact reflections and surreal dream sequences deepening our understanding of the characters in strange and poignant ways. A very promising debut.

Review - Black Pond

One of the strongest British debut features to bow this year, brittle, sepulchral comedy Black Pond bodes very well for the future careers of co-writing and helming partners Will Sharpe, a thesp who appears here, and Tom Kingsley, a director of commercials and musicvideos.