Bait (now on Hulu) looks like no other film in recent memory: Shooting on black-and-white 16mm film and in a narrow, boxy aspect ratio, writer-director Mark Jenkin emphasizes close-ups on faces and hands, drops in odd insert shots, and creates a grainy visual texture complete with scratches on the “print” and the occasionally washed-out image. Add in the obviously dubbed dialogue and audio track and you’ve got something resembling shitty television from the ’60s – an aesthetic choice too deliberate to be merely amateurish. There’s a level of affectation to Bait’s presentation suggesting… whatever you want it to suggest, I guess. Either way, it’s a hurdle to overcome on the way to feeling involved in this strangely engrossing class-divide drama.
BAIT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Cornwall. Grim times for fishermen. The seaside used to be for working folk and their homes. Now the property’s gentrified, the fishing boats repurposed to give idiot tourists 30-minute rides up and down the shore. At least that’s the case for Martin Ward (Edward Rowe). His brother Steven (Giles King) putt-putts a gaggle of blokes on a stag party – one wears a giant inflatable penis costume – up and down til they puke off the side. Meanwhile, Martin strings a net along the beach when the tide’s out, then untangles his exiguous catch from the line the next day. He bags a fish for each of his two neighbors, hanging them on their doorknobs, and sells the rest to the neighborhood pub and grill, which in one scene amounts to four sad fish. He puts the cash in a tin labeled “boat,” then takes a few quid out and heads to the pub. It’s a living. Barely.
His next idea might land him a few extra quid: A lobster pot in the gulley. One lonesome pot. That’s all you get when you don’t have a boat, and are too stubborn to change with the times. Can’t blame him, though; he feels a sense of loss and is having his livelihood taken away from him one sea bass at a time. The times – they seem bent on grinding people like Martin down to bloody nubs. The Leigh family owns his former family home, and if they don’t necessarily look down upon people like Martin, the class divide hovers in the air like the smell of salt and guano. Tim (Simon Shepherd) and Sandra Leigh (Mary Woodvine) stock the fridge with champagne. They argue with Martin about where he should park his truck when he’s pulling in his catch. Their son Hugo (Jowan Jacobs) snorkels in the water in the morning and pulls a few pints at night. Their daughter Katie (Georgia Ellery) spends the night with Neil (Isaac Woodvine), Steven’s son and Martin’s fishing assistant.
Tension simmers. “I’m just trying to earn a living, you know,” Mark tells the Leighs. “So are we,” Sandra retorts. The Leighs rent the upper unit to a young family. Toddler. Mom. Dad with a man-bun. Hipsters. They stop at the pub for dinner. The special is sea bass – “caught in this very cove,” the sign declares. Man-bun and his wife take them up on the offer, and eat some of Martin’s sea bass. There couldn’t have been many to go around. Makes that special extra-special, I guess. One morning Steven fires up the boat, nice and early. Man-bun emerges in his boxer-briefs to complain. “You gonna change the tides?” Martin shoots back. Nobody can change the tides. Nobody. That’s a man-vs.-nature conflict. This movie’s about man-vs.-man.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Haven’t spent this much time at the grim English seaside since hanging with grumpy Kate Winslet in Ammonite. Also haven’t spent this much time in a 4:3 aspect ratio along the grim seaside since RPattz and Dafoe lost their shit in The Lighthouse.
Performance Worth Watching: Rowe’s performance is… knowing. Not winking. Knowing. Aware of the film’s strange affectations and intentionally stiff dialogue. Yet he’s fully in character as the local curmudgeon who can’t even bring himself to be amused by a very drunk man wearing a giant schwantz on his head.
Memorable Dialogue: Martin describes to his brother their former home: “Been modernized. All bleddy ropes and chains though, you know? Looks a bit like a sex dungeon.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: The style is initially annoying, with its stilted dialogue and visual texture seemingly added in post-production. When characters speak with each other, Jenkin frequently cuts rapidly between closeup one-shots, creating an uptempo, herky-jerky rhythm. He occasionally drops in shots out of sequence, mini flash-forwards functioning as clear and deliberate foreshadowing. And such experimentalism works for the most part, challenging our sensibilities and pushing us out of comfort zones, perhaps mirroring the protagonist’s somewhat surreal point-of-view: with money comes man-buns.
Jenkin has an eye for a workman’s detail akin to Cormac McCarthy’s prose; if you want to learn how to tie knots and thread fishing nets, Bait might work as an instructional piece. Tonally, the film steers away from melodrama, and while it flirts with neorealism, it isn’t that either – it’s very much its own thing, a distinctive piece that feels at times provincial, as if anyone who hasn’t spent significant time on the Cornwall coast isn’t going to get some of the inside jokes. But its lament for a simpler time when the socioeconomic divisions between people didn’t seem so vast is wholly universal.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Bait is a fascinating drama whose experimentalism is a key component of the narrative. It’s not always an easy watch, but it’s definitely a worthy and immersive one.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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