An extraordinary debut: Make Up reviewed

Make Up is the first full-length film from writer–director Claire Oakley, set in an out-of-season holiday park on the Cornish coast where the wind blows, waves crash, rain lashes and gulls screech so you know it’s not a rom-com (foxes shriek in the night too). But while it’s easy to say what it isn’t, it’s harder to say what it is. It’s a thriller but not quite a thriller, and a horror flick but not quite a horror flick, and a psychosexual fantasy but not wholly a psychosexual fantasy… It may be we can settle only on one thing, and the one thing is this: it is very, very good.

Make Up stars the always excellent Molly Windsor as 18-year-old Ruth, who has travelled from Derby to the holiday park to stay with her boyfriend, Tom (Joseph Quinn), as it’s where he works in the winter. What is there to do in a holiday park over the winter? A lot, I discovered. For instance, every caravan has to be fumigated and wrapped in clingfilm, essentially. And standing in their rows, they do create an atmosphere of eerie suffocation. This, together with the soundscape — long grasses rustle, machinery bangs, polystyrene crackles, there are rumbles from God knows where — will fill you with a constant dread, as if something truly appalling is about to happen at any moment.

It’s unsettlingly creepy. If Cornwall still doesn’t want tourists to visit (as they might bring Covid), I would say that Make Up shown as a double-bill with Bait (Mark Jenkin’s 2019 film about tensions between fishermen and second-homers in a Cornish village and highly recommended) would probably ensure that no one gets further than Devon.