Film-maker and lecturer Mikey Murray has made a funny, stroppy, gloomy, punky movie for his crowdfunded lo-fi indie debut: a film in granular black-and-white with a little bit of Ben Wheatley in the mix, creatively using whatever locations come to hand and transforming almost hyperlocal personal material in the script. It’s a downbeat film, flawed and rough-around-the-edges, but weirdly likable in its morose stoicism and unexpected romanticism.
Steve Oram and Eilis Cahill play Paul and Lucy; Paul is a screenwriter, never leaving the house, brooding over a connoisseur-collection of vinyl and working on his sci-fi film script about a space cadet struggling with his sexuality – “Brokeback Mountain meets Silent Running” as he insouciantly puts it. (A good idea, actually – Murray should write it, if he hasn’t already.) And while working from home, Paul exchanges barbed badinage with the postman who brings him his many parcels. Lucy works in an office in a job that she hates and evidently has issues with depression and the attendant medication, problems to match Paul’s agoraphobia.
Their sex life has long since become dysfunctional and Lucy finds herself attracted to Daniel (Peter Bankole), a work colleague with whom her regular games of squash are displacement activity for something else; Lucy also wanly fantasises about happiness with horses during spacey reveries in full Instagram colour. There’s an amusing cameo for Julia Deakin (treasured for her appearances in Edgar Wright’s work) as a charity shop manager who finds herself selling Lucy a squash racket for 80p. Forty years ago, Chris Petit might have directed this and given a cameo role to Sting; Murray gives one to Jason Isaacs.
Mind-Set is a film that just rattles along, parochial in its way but garrulous and engaging, powered by English sarkiness and loneliness.
• Mind-Set is released on 6 October in UK cinemas and on digital platforms.
