‘I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning’ review: Tomorrow’s all-star cast of British and Irish actors elevates Cleo Barnard’s inconsistently compelling drama

A textbook example of how good casting lifts all boats, I see buildings falling like lightning Featuring five prominent British and Irish millennial actors – Anthony Boyle, Joe Cole, Guy Licurgo, Darryl McCormack and Lola Petticrew – at the head of a strong ensemble alongside well-chosen supporting players and non-professionals. The core quintet plays a gang of working-class friends who have known each other since high school but are now faced with difficult choices as adults in economically depressed Birmingham, England. Their fluid, nervous and intertwined performances make this British director Cleo Barnard’s best film in a while, though it still doesn’t reach the high bar set by her innovative debut. The tree.

Adapted by Enda Walsh (My love dies, Little things like this) from Kieran Goddard’s novel, Buildings The British-Irish Café offers a hearty dose of gritty realism, class consciousness and masculine desperation, all washed down with milky cups of message-carrying melodrama in the tradition of Ken Loach. This kind of package usually plays well at Cannes, where it debuted in the Director’s Fortnight series, though ultimately the end result was a bit flat and disappointing.

The poetic present tense title refers to the sight of tall buildings from the mid-20th century being blown into smithereens that the characters here remember observing years ago in their old neighborhood. In fact, in the 1990s and 2000s, municipalities across the country were happily demolishing brutalist buildings built to house the poor. Authorities have often made empty promises to replace the projects with better structures, less prone to crime, damp and black mold, and not as tainted as the dangerous cost-cutting construction that led to the burning of Grenfell Tower in London in 2017, killing 72 people. Just to underscore the point, Barnard and editor Maya Mafioli pasted in archival footage of tower blocks imploding and collapsing in clouds of dust, into which, according to Ollie (Licurgo), he was able to see the face of Satan himself. But given how often Ollie was high on drugs on those days, such devilish visions probably meant it was Tuesday.

True, the film begins with Ollie doing booze, cocaine, and maybe some heroin at his birthday party at The Castle, a local bar everyone has been going to for years. (Some of the background artists and characters of just a few lines are locals and staff from a real Birmingham pub.) The party reunites Ollie with his four oldest friends from school days: old couple Patrick (Boyle, from the stage). Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), a food courier with a bachelor’s degree, and Chef Petticrew, who became famous for his indelible TV shows Say nothing), caring for her children and her elderly mother, now has two young daughters (Skyla Rose Steward and Elsie Mae Vitiello Minshull); Aspiring developer and perpetually boiling pot of rage, Connor (McCormack, The dead man woke up); And the working-class hero made Ryan good (Cole, Peaky Blinders and Skins), who went to work in finance in London, and now earns more in one month than all the others together earn in one year.

The grainy, choppy party sequence, featuring plenty of handheld shots and slow-motion glass breaks, vividly illustrates the camaraderie and deep affection between the five main characters, who tease and tickle each other like overgrown sporting puppies. But underneath the smiles and hugs and wisdom, cracks and charged moments can be glimpsed, like an exhausted Connor nearly getting into a pointless bar fight or Ryan giving Patrick and Shiv the kind of look you’d see in a cat before it knocks a glass vase off the table.

Goddard’s novel is divided into a series of first-person interior monologues from each principle and covers a long period of time, and it is clear that Walsh and Barnard struggled to keep that polyphonic symphony going throughout the film. The transitions here are sometimes jarring and lack quality, creating choppy pacing as you jump from one character to the next. We’re able to gauge the amount of time that has passed by how construction progresses on the apartment complex Connor oversees, as we see it rise floor by floor in a time lapse, mirroring demolition footage elsewhere.

It turns out that Ryan is partly financing the project, a block of flats that will house either “yuppies” (or as one old drinker calls them, “yippies”) or a younger generation of clients in need of state-subsidized housing like the protagonists’ parents. Patrick clearly hopes to achieve the latter, and he says as much in several drunken speeches full of progressive political rhetoric. But his utopian vision of a past paradise of social cohesion destroyed by capitalism in its final stages does not take into account the serpents that have always been present in this imaginary Garden of Eden, including personal betrayal close to home that only slithers out in a moment of drunken weakness.

Boyle puts more meat on Patrick’s bare bones with an emotional performance that meshes neatly with Petticrew’s role as the slight-in-stature but formidably strong-willed Chef. Both actors are from Northern Ireland, but they master a difficult Brummie accent, as do the rest of the main cast, none of whom are from the Midlands. Clearly, space was made in the production process for the actors to build a sense of brotherly solidarity through improvisation and spontaneity on set, an ease that comes from the way they interact through dance and touch. But this body has to do a lot of work to convince us that it’s plausible that these five different people would still be friends at this point in their lives.

Although they’re all supposed to be around the same age, Connor and Ollie look like they’re from different generations, even though the actors are only five years apart. This stems in part from the way McCormack displays the allure of a man grappling with forces and feelings beyond his control, which prevents him from seeking help when everything starts going south. All sweet Ollie has to worry about, apart from overcoming some major addictions, is how to make sure he has enough money to pay for dog food for his beloved dog, Lulu. Ryan likewise suffers from aphasia and masculine anxiety, but his story feels less convincing, as if designed solely to prove that money can’t buy happiness, even if Cole convincingly suggests unspoken depths.

Barnard has always coaxed thoughtful, layered performances from her cast and knows this kind of battered-but-unbendable community like the back of her hand. But the drama here feels too schematic, predicting a tragic fate from the first scene onwards as everyone celebrates as if their lives depended on it. You just know that before the credits roll, someone will have lost their raging battle with the death of light, and just as there will be a hangover in the morning, there will be a funeral in the same pub.