Beat
2013 · 12m · UK
Directed by Aneil Karia
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
A man navigating London streets walks a paper-thin line between joy and hopelessness, moving to a visceral internal rhythm that compels him to dance and escalates into conflict.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Ben Whishaw dance-walking through London mental health crisis on 16mm — Aneil Karia knows what he's doing, but the 'dialogue-free choreographed dread' mode is a well-trampled British indie path. Beautiful, predictable.
Karia would later direct The Long Goodbye with Riz Ahmed, and this 16mm, near-dialogue-free Ben Whishaw-led portrait of mental-health crisis is clearly the early formal statement that announced him — the lineage is Ratcatcher and Ramsay's grammar of bodies in cities. A serious work.
16mm and almost entirely dialogue-free with Ben Whishaw — that's a film betting everything on physicality, grain texture, and the choreography of mental-health collapse. Aneil Karia (who later directed The Long Goodbye) using movement as externalized interiority is precisely the craft signature that became his career.
Festivals
- Edinburgh IFF 2013
- BFI London Film Festival 2014