The Last Great Wilderness (18); <br></br> I Capture The Castle (PG)

We're on a road to nowhere (yippee!)

Two otherwise unrelated British films out this week have just enough in common to suggest they might be the result of a curious experiment. Perhaps there's some funding programme that allows British film-makers to do whatever they like as long as the story involves two young men blundering into a remote, run-down country house, and as long as there is nudity and pagan rites. Now there's a scheme guaranteed to sort the sheep from the goats. The sheep this week is I Capture the Castle, a mild-mannered and woolly period drama. The goat – smelly, omnivorous and liable to turn nasty at any moment – is The Last Great Wilderness, part thriller, part chiller, part Dogme-esque digital ramble.

The Last Great Wilderness is itself an untamed expanse of a film, a tract of narrative which leads you up tangled, overgrown paths, and just occasionally into patches of drab wasteland. The debut feature by Scottish director David Mackenzie challenges the commonly-held wisdom that you can't make road movies in Britain because the roads are too short to get you anywhere. In fact, as this film shows, once you get off the highway and start exploring the involuted depths of the countryside, there's no knowing where you'll end up, or if you'll ever find your way out.

The travellers in Mackenzie's film are Charlie (the genially frazzled Alastair Mackenzie, the director's brother), a young man on a mission of revenge, and Vincente (played with demented, greasy vim by Jonny Phillips), a mercurial gigolo on the run from gangland enemies. The story begins in a nondescript motorway diner – whether it's a Little Chef or a Happy Eater, it's the quintessential non-place of the British cultural landscape – where Vincente hitches a ride in grotesquely farcical circumstances. There's nothing like starting a film with a flourish of bloody-minded cheek, as Mackenzie does in the toilet scene which cements the men's fate.

This unlikely pair hit the road, whingeing, bickering, testing each other's machismo and endurance. It's clear things will turn nasty but we're not sure how. Then they run out of petrol and wander into an Old Dark House full of stuffed birds, dark corners and creaking doors: you're not sure whether it's an outlying branch of the Bates Motel or the House of Shaws from Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped. The house's occupants are suitably strange – among them a paedophile, a sex addict and a mysterious paranoid woman (Victoria Smurfit), all tended to by David Hayman, shifting inscrutably between menace and avuncular warmth. As soon as Hayman intimates that the house has recently seen "a wee bit of a tragedy", you know things are going to hot up, and Mackenzie lays on the ensuing strangeness more than liberally: sex, hunting, spectral visitations, video voyeurism, a jolly transvestite soirée, a lively set by Scottish indie veterans the Pastels, and fire-walking.

This is certainly the most wayward narrative feature to be made in Britain, but the magic of it is that you accept its twists, even when they seem dictated by circumstance rather than narrative necessity: its four credited writers, including the two Mackenzies, seem to make it up as they go along, like a true dead-of-night campfire yarn. Despite its lawlessness, the film nevertheless seems grounded in a basic normality, partly as a result of the digital photography: any film that begins by staring into a plate of Little Chef fry-up is bound to be rooted in the everyday cold clamminess of the British experience.

For all its eerieness and Grand Guignol (the supernatural element, I have to say, is a major miscalculation) the film is good-humoured and finally quite cathartic. The ending, you might say, is feelgood Gothic, which surely makes it unique. It's in no way a handsome film: downright unsightly, rather, but its murky grey-brown digital finish truly captures the feel of a rain-sodden, murky, forever autumnal Scotland. Adventurous and very entertaining, The Last Great Wilderness is wilfully ragged and lo-fi in a way we don't see much of in Britain. David Mackenzie's follow-up, Young Adam, with Ewan McGregor, will be under scrutiny in Cannes this week: the term "watch this space" definitely applies.

By contrast, I Capture the Castle is the sort of British film you didn't think they made any more – a well-mannered 1930s romance with splendid gowns, plucky gels and crumbling battlements. It's adapted from the novel by Dodie Smith, author of 101 Dalmatians, and oh how you yearn for a Cruella De Vil to spice things up. This BBC project is such a dainty, quaint confection that you can't quite imagine who it's aimed at: perhaps first-time American visitors who like a bit of local colour in their in-flight movie.

Romola Garai and Rose Byrne – both of whom, it must be said, have perfect 1930s chins – play the daughters, one plucky and thoughtful, the other a flame-haired flibbertigibbet, of a burned-out novelist (Bill Nighy). One day, two extremely bland young Americans (Marc Blucas, Henry Thomas) visit the family's mouldering castle and the girls' lives are changed for ever. This is the posh period equivalent of those coming-of-age dramas mocked by Christina Ricci in The Opposite of Sex: "After that summer, nothing would be the same again..." Even by the standards of Sunday teatime heritage drama, this would be soft stuff – commonsensical and rain-sodden, with a dab of bohemian eccentricity. If the average Austen adaptation is a box of Quality Street, this is a slab of Kendall Mint Cake: it's rather like The Railway Children for grown-ups. The always-watchable Nighy increasingly resembles a personification of Stress in a mediaeval mystery play, Tara Fitzgerald is vigorously fruity as the girls' torridly arty stepmother, while Romola Garai's heroine is brisk, well-scrubbed and touching. For purely accidental reasons, the most arresting presence is Rose Byrne, who looks so uncannily like Bernadette Peters that you expect her to burst into selections from Sondheim. Sweet-natured but sodden, I Capture the Castle is British period film-making at its most antediluvian.

j.romney@independent.co.uk

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