Posted in: Movies, Review | Tagged: Jo Hartley, Swede Caroline
Swede Caroline is Best In Show meets Hot Fuzz, released in the UK on Friday the 19th of April, 2024. And well worth digging up.
Article Summary
- ‘Swede Caroline’ is a mockumentary-style film blending comedy and unexpected turns.
- Jo Hartley shines in a nuanced performance, anchoring the film’s surprising depth.
- From suburban strife to life-and-death stakes, the story’s scope expands thrillingly.
- Directed by Brook Driver and Finn Bruce, it’s lauded as the best post-lockdown film.
Swede Caroline is a new movie released on Friday this week in the UK in a number of select cinemas that, outside of London, you’ll be hard-pressed to track down, and outside the UK, just forget it. Except obviously, don’t because it will be well worth hunting down however you achieve it. Appropriate too, given how much of a role hunting plays in this film. A comedy in a faux documentary fashion that the fashionable kids forty years ago called a mockumentary. But it is so much more. Presented as a documentary that got out of hand, this new film starts in a simple, mundane fashion but promises something way bigger courtesy of the tense and over-the-top Netflix-True-Crime-style titles. I said Best In Show meets Hot Fuzz in the article title, but I have a few of them to drop if the PR people want to use them. Spinal Tap meets Wire In The Blood. This Country meets Straw Dogs. Shameless meets Saltburn. It also happens to be the best film I have seen since lockdown when everything reset anyway. Oppenheimer can go swivel.
Nothing I thought was going to happen happened. Everything was perfectly set up, yet it came as a complete surprise. It starts as a gentle “smile comedy” about Caroline played by After Life‘s Jo Hartley, a suburban divorced single woman trying to get by. She finds recognition in local agriculture competitions, but is denied entry of her massive marrow over misogyny and class attitudes. And that is absolutely what it feels like this film is all going to be about.
There is an air of conspiracy about these decisions made by vegetable bigwigs, fostered by one of her frustrated male friends, Paul, played by Is It Legal and Sugar Rush‘s Richard Lumsden, and part of the tin foil hat brigade. A sense of revenge from another frustrated friend, Willy, played by Celyn Jones of Set Fire To The Stars, who has a surprising yet totally consistent lifestyle change. Toss in a slice of inappropriate madness from a swinging detective played This Way Up‘s Aisling Bea, who is everything these vegetable growers are not, but part of a world that Caroline used to belong to. And you think you have a handle on what is going down, even as the film switches up from the suburban allotments to the greenhouses of the stately homes. Because at that point, Alice Lowe of Garth Merenghi and Prevenge turns up, and everything utterly and absolutely goes to hell. As Caroline says to camera, “in hindsight, we should have called the police at that stage.” But they don’t.
And suddenly, the film turns into a hilarious and thrilling rollercoaster. Swede Caroline is a film about someone who can somehow graft together the seedlings she was never meant to cultivate before pulling an enormous revelation out of the ground. There’s an old line about how football isn’t a matter of life or death, it’s much more than that. It’s an aspect of humanity that we attach the most importance to what others may see as unimportant, whether that’s sport, comic books, or agricultural prowess, even as our life is falling apart. So, as Caroline is dealing with her ex-husband being diagnosed with a sudden terminal illness, bringing their history back to the fore, the running around both council estates and manor estates becomes a mentally welcome distraction from real life – even when it does indeed become a matter of life and death, for real. Even as her friends use her “bad man radar” to identify possible threats.
The gentle smiles at the beginning grow rapidly in massive laugh-out-loud moments by the end, and the jaded critics I saw this with, who were definitely mumbling a sneer or two in the first ten minutes, were weeping tears of laughter by the end, struggling to catch their breath. I was thrilled, I was surprised, I was lifted and my wellington boots were knocked off. There are class issues brought to the fore, the sense of powerlessness that we all feel, the various ways we try to trick ourselves and muddle through life. And then there are the people we can become, still with all our flaws, when the situation presents itself. Those are the people that the cast of Swede Caroline get to be. Far away from the city, to the beat of local hop hop and filled with their own small madnesses, they still get their heroic stories. Well, most of them.
Jo Hartley as Caroline is, by far, the stand out. A major step away from recent roles, she suits this film so well, by giving a performance that is anti-acting, even more so than in This Is England. Uncomfortable with the camera, but in a classic British trope, not wanting to cause a fuss. She is driven by the strongest of emotions, but just doesn’t seem to want the life that this film is forcing on her. And yet, the camera loves her, the film feels at its most truthful, honest and energised when she is its focus, and the least likely of characters will have the audience cheering her on. Like the film, she is a grower, not a shower.
A debut feature for the directing duo Brook Driver and Finn Bruce, written by Driver, and produced by Belstone Pictures, Picnik Entertainment and Deadbeat Studios, Swede Caroline, is in UK Cinemas from 19th April. The trailer above only hints at the madness.
Swede Caroline
Review by Rich Johnston
8.5/10
Swede Caroline starts as a sweet film about intercine agricultural rivalry, but becomes something far larger, with Jo Hartley excelling with an “anti-acting” approach that dominates the screen. She’s a grower, not a shower.
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