Handsomely cloaked in misty menace and heavy weather, an irate wind whistling through every pause in its soundtrack, “Gwen” turns out to be something of a wolf in another wolf’s c…
Eleanor Worthington-Cox, Maxine Peake, Jodie Innes, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Gwion Glyn, Richard Harrington, Richard ElfynHandsomely cloaked in misty menace and heavy weather, an irate wind whistling through every pause in its soundtrack, “” turns out to be something of a wolf in another wolf’s clothing.
Approach the film with managed genre expectations, however, and there’s much to admire in its formidable, stormcloud-hued atmospherics, low-simmer storytelling and a particularly fine, unaffected breakout performance by teenage actress Eleanor Worthington-Cox in the testing title role.
As their farm struggles, local slate-mine barons circle the land as a potential new quarry site, with little in the way of polite negotiation. Three unprotected women, after all, are expected to step aside and let masculine industry take its course.
The film’s first half cultivates this sense of mounting, claustrophobic hopelessness with slow-strangle aplomb. McGregor’s directorial rigor is perfectly served by Adam Etherington’s ravishingly desolate lensing, which picks out more shades of gray than a whole E.L. James library, and the invaluable sound design of Anna My Bertmark — who, as in Francis Lee’s equally weather-tousled “God’s Own Country,” captures and conducts an icy British wind as a separate score in itself.
Even in the film’s hazier spots, Worthington-Cox is a bright, focus-bringing presence. The actress — Elle Fanning’s younger self from 2014’s “Maleficent,” and an Olivier Award winner for the original West End production of “Matilda” — was 16 at the time of filming, and plays an often passively perceptive character with a deft blend of naive curiosity and old-soul exhaustion, from her timorous phrasing to her crumpled gait.
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