Littermates

Bluesky

In a remote house in the English countryside, one man takes in two vulnerable strangers, a man and a woman, and insists that they follow a strict set of rules, one of which is that they must never leave the estate. If they do, he warns, they could be blown into a million pieces. He controls every aspect of their lives, even down to what they are allowed to read. Over time the man grows jealous, the woman grows restless, and there is trouble on the horizon.

You may think you know what you’re getting with a package like this, but directors Scott Tinkham and Michael Woloson will blindside you at every turn, except perhaps the last. They have no interest in following the conventional script. They have no interest in conventional cynicism. Littermates is a film full of kindness, blending real sweetness with the unutterably bleak, equally at ease with the comic and the tragic.

Each time he brings a new arrival to the house, Chester (Oliver Woolf) fires off a flare. What signal is he sending, and who to? We see barely anyone else, with most of the film playing out as a three-hander. It’s not clear that there are many other people. We hear explosions in the distance, see puffs of discoloured smoke, and there is talk of war. It is war, and, specifically, chemical weaponry, that has damaged the man and the woman, to whom Chester gives the names Liam (Joey Bader) and Mel (Kaylee McGregor). Painstakingly, he re-establishes their ability to communicate and soothes their damaged psyches. They learn to work on their skills in exchange for simple rewards, and they learn to run directly to the shelter whenever they hear the siren. it is, however, a way of life that is desperately precarious.

Who is Chester? Of the three of them, he is the one about whom we get the most clues. Little comments he makes, and mementos we see about the house, suggest that he has lived here since childhood. A picture of a smiling ginger-haired boy with a dolphin suggests the same sensitivity that we see in him now – and, perhaps, the same attitude to wild things. He refers to their little group as a family and seems to need it as much as they do. One wonders what he has lost. Unlike them, he will be keenly aware of it, but he keeps any pain to himself.

It is difficult not to think of TS Eliot. Are we watching the world end? Trapped between the past and future, unable to find direction, they seem to have a lot in common with the bulk of humanity as it is today. One might also read the film as a take on Genesis, especially in light of the forest which surrounds the garden, where Mel is drawn to a particular tree, more than usually hesitant to obey. Sometimes the rules seem to make no sense, like the six foot Liam trying to hide under the bed when he’s in trouble. Perhaps there is no hope, but nonetheless, the effort is made, and through that, something of what it meant to be human is regained.

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