I SEE BUILDINGS FALL LIKE LIGHTNING

This time, Barnard moves towards a more conventional, though no less strikingly contemporary, form of social cinema, unafraid to offer a clear-eyed diagnosis of the world it depicts.

Five friends, bound together by a shared childhood in a working-class Birmingham neighbourhood, are still grappling with the challenges of adulthood, which has sent each of them down a different path. Now in their thirties, they are anxiously learning what it means to grow up: Patrick and Shiv are raising two daughters; Oli is trying to make a living without hurting anyone; Conor is overseeing the construction of an elegant house financed by Rian, the only one of the group to have made money and built a life for himself in London. Their friendship collides with the realities of class and money, a world shaped by the decline of working-class values and the cruelty of neoliberal logic. A university degree offers no protection from precocity; money offers none from loneliness.

I SEE BUILDINGS FALL LIKE LIGHTNING draws the viewer in from the outset with its intensity of colour, dynamic framing and tangle of voices, laughter and sounds, all heightened by music from The Streets that fits the film perfectly. Yet euphoria can quickly tip into drama. Neoliberalism destroys community, and without community, the world will collapse like lightning. Clio Barnard is not afraid to make this clear in the film's manifesto.

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Text: dr Karolina Kosińska