Better Things Review

"Nothing" is the word which forms both the entry and the exit to Duane Hopkins' woozy analysis of smack-induced nihilism, a film about the need to feel nothing when everything is at stake. It's followed by a weary line taken from the novelist Miranda Lee. "This was real life, and real was difficult, at best".

Emptiness is a defining property for the characters in Better Things whose title suggests an irony absent from the grim events unfolding in a smack-stricken Cotswold village. Here the accumulation of empty days which make up empty lives in England's empty places is plugged by drugs which - depending on how you look at it - are either fatally efficient or hopelessly useless.

Hopkins' multi-stranded film, set in the area where the writer-director grew up and acted by a mostly non-professional cast, follows two distinct sections of this unreported community. Here are the kids: Rob (Liam Mcllfatrick) is a pale and gentle heroin user whose girlfriend Tess (Emma Cooper) has just died from an overdose. Sarah (Tara Ballard) is a student who returns home to the village from college. She and her boyfriend David (Che Corr) are heavy users but like all these kids in the film's early stages, they respect the invisible tripwire that exists between smoking smack and injecting. Larry (Kurt Taylor) is an angry, jealous school kid whose ex Rachel (Megan Palmer) is now going out with someone else. And Gail (Rachel McIntyre) sits at home reading books in bed, imprisoned not by addiction but by her agoraphobic fear of the world outside.

Just as these teenagers are trying to make sense of where they are and where they're going, so the village's elderly are trying to understand where they've been and what is to come. Death is the gauge against which all these lives are measured out. Gail's grandmother (Patricia Loveland) returns from hospital to the family home and she hasn't got long to go. Rob has a mate called Jon (Freddie Cunliffe) whose grandfather (Frank Bench) is also released from hospital, but Mr Gladwin won't talk to his wife (Betty Bench) because he's haunted by the memory - or is it a more recent discovery? - of some undisclosed betrayal in the past.