Film review: Arcadia: By Paul Wright
ARCADIA: A FILM BY PAUL WRIGHT (BFI) 6/10
Award-winning director Paul Wright pieces together reels of archival footage from 20th-century Britain. The history of people’s creation and enjoyment of the land across the British Isles is collated in this journey through film. It explores our complex history of protest, performance, and entertainment, drawing on over 100 years of footage.
Directed by Paul Wright, best known for For Those in Peril, Arcadia is an archival remix that examines our deep and often conflicted relationship with the land we live on. With a score composed by Portishead’s Adrian Utley and Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory, the film embarks on a visceral journey through the seasons, uncovering the beauty, brutality, magic, and madness of Britain’s changing landscape and society. Blending folk horror with archive film, it offers a fresh, haunting perspective on the past. As Stuart Maconie of BBC 6 Music describes, it is “wonderful, frightening, lovely and engrossing.”
The film is assembled in a way that is at times uncomfortable, with avant-garde sounds overlaying rapidly cutting scenes of history, jumping decades at a time. However, it is also powerful in places. Utley and Gregory’s evocative score takes us on a folk-horror audio-visual journey that evokes thoughts of ancestry and the UK’s evolving connection with both the land and each other.
It’s a strange trip, following the seasons and depicting the harshness and exquisiteness of Britain’s past. This is a film that’s unchallenging on the mind, perfect for chilling out and enjoying the soundtrack.
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