2024 BFI Flare Film Review – Silver Haze (2023)

Five years ago, director Sacha Polak introduced us to the raw, then-untrained acting talent of Vicky Knight in Dirty God. Silver Haze sees them back together: Knight has more experience under her belt and her own past provides the inspiration for a story which could simply be viewed as a slice of working-class life, but which has more to say about the complexities of relationships and families in particular.

Franky (Knight) combines working as a nurse with holding together her chaotic family and trying to find a way out of an empty relationship. Just beneath the surface, she simmers with anger about a fire that left her with scars when she was a child. After calling time on her boyfriend, she finds herself attracted to one of her patients, Florence (Esme Creed-Miles), who is recovering from a suicide attempt. The two become close and go to Florence’s hometown to stay with her grandmother, where Franky finds the kind of open-minded surrogate family she needs to help her on the road to confronting her past.

Her blood family has deep-rooted problems, placing all manner of demands on her – her mother is an alcoholic, her sister is in an abusive relationship – and she’s on the receiving end of homophobic insults. Her substitute family are the complete opposite, with Alice (Angela Bruce), the grandmother, arriving at exactly the right time in Franky’s life to give her the , comion, and sense of security she so desperately needs. And she knows which of the two is the real family, with the values and structure to help her come to with what happened to her and take those first, less angry, steps forward. But her connection with the family she’s left behind never goes away: sister Leah (played by Knight’s own sister, Charlotte Knight) converts to Islam, but always stays in close touch.

What Polak gives us this time is an intimate, often improvised, look at working class life shown through a comionate lens. There’s no question that Franky’s family are rough, have problems and are generally not easy to be around, but fundamentally they’re still people and there’s never a hint of condescension in the script. There are times, however, when it becomes bogged down in a few too many sub-plots, so that the main narrative is thrown off course. Once the honeymoon period of Franky and Florence’s relationship is over, the younger girl’s temperament changes radically: frustratingly, it’s never really explained as the film’s attention shifts to another storyline instead.

While the multitude of sub-plots is the film’s biggest weakness, its strength lies in its performances: as the ailing but rock-solid grandmother, Bruce is outstanding, while Knight herself shows that Dirty God was no one-hit-wonder. Drawing on her personal past, she infuses her portrayal with subtlety and nuance, helping us to understand her deep-rooted anger so that, when she erupts, we shake our heads and wish she could find another way. She’s astonishingly watchable.

★★★★

Playing at 2024 BFI Flare on 14th/15th March, in UK cinemas from March 29th / Vicky Knight, Esme Creed-Miles, Charlotte Knight, Archie Brigden, Angela Bruce / Dir: Sacha Polak / BFI Distribution / 15

Watch our interview with the film’s director, Sacha Polak