Tom Kingsley

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.

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.