Movie review: Life Just Is

(NC)

You can see the influences on Alex Barrett’s debut feature, most prominently Mike Leigh and Eric Rohmer.

It’s easy enough to admire the slow-burning artistry too – the unusual framing, the pauses, the pared-down style, the painstaking attention toward character and dialogue. The very big downside is that the writer-director’s protagonists – the five twentysomething graduates sharing a house in London and trying to cope with the vicissitudes of adult life and independence – are so extraordinarily dull. As they agonise over relationships, religion, jobs and friendship, their self-obsessiveness becomes more and more grating.