Off to the local indie this week, in the interests of nurturing as many nearby cinemas as possible in this difficult time – though while I applaud their dedication to shining a light into lesser-known recesses of the art, you have to wonder if showing micro-budget independent British comedy-dramas is the best choice to pull the punters in. (I say this solely from a place of love, and also as part-owner of the place, though it's a hard truth that holding somewhat less than 0.08% of the shares rather limits one's ability to set policy.)

It's usually a bit of a giveaway when a film, and indeed several people involved in key roles on the film, don't have their own Wiki pages (I'm not sure what this says about the modern world, but it does say something). Mind-Set, the micro-budget independent British comedy-drama in question, was filmed on location in Lincoln, being written and directed by Mikey Murray, a lecturer in film studies at the university of Lincoln. Now, I'm not the type to start punching down on Lincoln, having fond memories of the place (or, at least, a girl studying at Lincoln who I used to go out with, nearly thirty years ago), but this might all start to sound a bit like a student film project that has somehow managed to wangle a wider release.

This impression is somewhat kept at bay by the presence in the cast of several familiar faces, mostly in cameo roles. The most prominent person-it's-just-possible-you've-heard-of is Steve Oram, who's had bit parts in Midsomer Murders and Line of Duty and co-wrote and starred in Ben Wheatley's Sightseers. This film has a sort of vaguely Wheatley-ish, Edgar Wright-ish vibe about it, though it is entirely lacking in the genre elements that usually appear in their work.

The film opens with a lyrical, soft-focus shot of pastoral countryside with a wild horse running free; it abruptly cuts to a black and white shot of a couple in bed where some slightly dysfunctional intimacy is clumsily in progress. 'I can't feel my arm any more,' says Lucy (Eilis Cahill). 'Keep going, I'm nearly there,' grunts Paul (Oram). (The film manages to be explicit without being graphic fairly well, most of the time.) The tone is thus largely set for what follows.

The background of the two characters is sketched in with considerable deftness: Lucy and Paul have been a couple for a long time and their relationship is possibly stagnating a bit. She used to be an actress, but is now doing an admin job in a local firm, which she hates; this has impacted on her mental health to the point where she is taking medication for it. Paul initially seems like a delusional loser, suffering from agoraphobia – he claims to be working on the screenplay for a science fiction film about a gay space cadet ('it's Brokeback Mountain meets Silent Running'), but spends most of his time arguing with the postman, watching tennis on the internet (he appears to have something of a fetish), or viewing less wholesome things. He comes across as self-centred, needy and obnoxious; Lucy is usually tolerant of his nonsense.

Then Lucy meets a new co-worker (Peter Bankole) whom she starts playing squash with at lunchtimes; this is obviously going somewhere not strictly sports-related. It seems like Paul wouldn't necessarily have a big issue with that, as he seems intent on manoeuvring Lucy into joining the local tennis club and playing games with their neighbour. An actor friend comes up from London to visit, which ends in a big row with Lucy when he recoils from the idea of playing a gay character in the space cadet film.

It sounds quite inconsequential, and this is certainly a film made on a personal scale, but all the time characters are being developed, plot threads advanced, a trajectory established. It turns out to be a film about two characters who live together and are clearly attached to each other, but who are really failing to communicate in any meaningful way. As a result the film largely breaks down into Lucy's story and Paul's story.

The former is more successful, as Eilis Cahill manages to bring subtlety and understatement to her depiction of a woman gradually beginning to realise just how unhappy she actually is – the film skates easily back and forth across the line between understated comedy and drama when Cahill is on the screen, and is always very watchable. Oram's scenes as Paul are a bit more problematic – it almost feels like there are two distinct sensibilities at work here, with Paul's character the result of a much more broadly comedic one. There's less pathos and more hunting around for a broad laugh; Oram seems less confident with the dramatic scenes than the comic ones.

There's also a slightly wrong-footing moment when it turns out that Paul's connection to a big-name actor planning his directorial debut turns out not to be the stuff of fantasy – as we've almost been led to expect – but reality; also, he really did have a big movie script produced years ago, but it was apparently scuppered by a clueless director. This feels rather at odds with the mostly pathetic loser he's been portrayed as up to this point, but I suppose it's all because the plot requires it. (Jason Isaacs makes a very brief cameo as the actor-turned-director, though never appears on screen with Oram or Cahill – who knows, he may never even have been to Lincoln.)

Nevertheless, the film hangs together, engages and entertains in its ultra-lo-fi way – you can't help feeling that the plotline about Lucy is doing most of the heavy lifting, but the stuff about Paul isn't entirely without merit, either. The film reaches what feels like a natural conclusion, and you wait for the fade, and the credits. But the film goes on, possibly just wanting to hit the ninety-minute milestone, and there's an attempt at a hard-hitting final plot development that's aiming for tragic but can't help coming across as overwrought and melodramatic. It's a shame, because it means you're left with a reminder of the film's less accomplished, more clumsy elements, rather than the parts of it which have been made with genuine skill and intelligence. Mind-Set's low budget and some of its subject matter mean that a slightly culty following is likely the best it can hope for – but that's not to say that there aren't worthwhile and enjoyable things about it, particularly Cahill's performance. In the end though, one suspects that obscurity beckons, which is a bit of a shame.

Also Showing...

. . . Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon (though not showing more than a couple of times a day, I'll bet). One of the elder statesmen of American cinema is on magisterial form with this tale of the property rights of an oil-rich Native American tribe being encroached upon by rapacious white men. Magisterial, but not exactly nimble; the film is strong on detail and period atmosphere, less so on incident and set-piece moments. Leonardo DiCaprio is clearly very, very keen to win an Oscar for his role as a weak and greedy man in thrall to his wealthy uncle, and as a result is sometimes caught acting; Robert De Niro takes it much easier and is better as a result. You would like to see more of Lily Gladstone's quiet and graceful performance as DiCaprio's wife. Clearly a lavish and intelligent film with many good things to offer; at 206 minutes, it is also hard not to feel that it's overlong.

The Great Escaper (directed by Oliver Parker) lasts a brisk 90-or-so minutes, and stars the 90-or-so Sir Michael Caine (Caine has since announced this is his last film), alongside the late Glenda Jackson. The plot is a scrap of gossamer – a veteran pensioner goes off to France for the D-day celebrations without telling anyone, while his wife covers for his absence from their care home – but it gives Caine and Jackson a chance to remind us of how good they could still be, and the film manages to smuggle moments of real poignancy and warmth into what could have been a by-the-numbers piece of sentimental mawkishness. Don't rule out some kind of Oscar nod for Caine.

Awix

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