With a title like The Black Forest, you may be expecting this review to be on your standard run-of-the-mill low budget horror film. Instead, Ruth Platt’s The Black Forest is a solid, compelling drama about two families on vacation, as they attempt to leave their issues at home. But end up bringing their emotional baggage along with them. As the narrative and tension unfold, the relationship between the two couples breaks down as old skeletons come tumbling out of the closest.
While there are some budget restraints and few issues with pacing, there’s much to admire here in terms of its ambition and approach to telling an all too familiar narrative in a fresh way. Platt is clearly drawing on her own personal experiences and captures the tension that hangs over holidays as a family tries to cling onto a sense of structure and normality, but slowly implodes.
The film begins in the early hours of the morning, with a family leaving their suburb house to travel to a holiday home in Germany. The family is made up of parents, Beth (Hattie Ladbury) and Darko (Aleksandar Mikic) and their children Theo and Milo. The family will be joined by their friends, Jack (Robert Hands), Maggie (Sirine Saba) and their children (Phoebe, Guy, Tabby, and Caspar).
Anyone who has had to endure long car journeys, can probably relate to the children, as their father Darko begins a lesson in the channel tunnel and how the UK used to be connected to mainland Europe. There’s something somewhat universal about that feeling you being lectured at by a parent, and you’re trapped in a confined space.
Beth and Darko arrive ahead of their friends, who have actually stopped off so Maggie can do some shopping. When the other family arrives, all chaos breaks out, and Maggie seems far more interested in her mobile phone than looking after her hyperactive children. This leaves Beth struggling to look after six children and run around after her husband, who acts like the biggest kid out of all of them (so much for a relaxing holiday).
Slowly it is revealed that Maggie is having an affair with an old flame, and Jack is fully aware of this infidelity. Beth can hardly worry about Jack and Maggie’s relationship, as she soon discovers that Darko is keeping his own secrets, which may result in bankruptcy or at worse, Darko going to jail.
The performances are probably the film’s strongest attribute, with Ladbury holding the film together. Ladbury’s Beth may not be easy to like at times, especially in her passive-aggressive attitude towards Darko, but we can relate to her frustrations and understand the pressure she is under to hold her family unit together. Sirine Saba’s Maggie is a woman who is the polar opposite of Beth, and at first, she comes across as breezy and carefree. Although we come to discover that Maggie is suffering from her own identity crisis, as she tries to cling on the thrills of her past life.
The film contains some intimate moments, where Beth shares her worries with Maggie, and we discover how fragile Beth is, barely holding it together. How the scene unfolds reflects Platt’s background in theatre. And while the film feels small in terms of scope and framing, Platt does her best to make up for this by having her characters feel fully developed and real.
This year’s Edinburgh Film Festival saw a strong array of female-led films promoting female voices and their stories, and Platt’s The Black Forest is a perfect example of the female gaze. Showing us the lives of two women trying to adjust to the responsibilities of motherhood, and share the burden of being a spouse.
The Black Forest may have a micro-budget of £30,000, but it looks like it has a higher production value. The film’s cinematographer Oskar Kudlacik manages to capture the beauty of the film’s picturesque location, the Baden-Württemberg woods, in a way that feels like a comforting home video. There are sweet, tender montages of the children playing in ignorant bliss, running around spraying each other with water guns or playing on fairground rides.
These small moments are what life is really about, and with their inclusion Platt is kindly reminding us of what really matters. We could all learn something from the children in this film (who all deliver great performances). Sometimes you need to learn to leave all the issues at home and just embrace the holiday life. Ruth Platt is certainly one to keep your eye on, and it’ll be interesting to see what she does next.
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