I saw Vicky Knight being interviewed around the time Silver Haze came out in 2023. She is its star, as she was in Sacha Polak’s previous film, Dirty God, and is once again hellishly good as a woman in search of a better life being tripped up by her circumstances.
The jaw-to-the-floor moment of the interview came when the quietly spoken and very unactorly Knight revealed that she still had a day job, working in Britain’s National Health Service as a health support worker. Everyone in the room took a breath.
The scarring she sustained after being trapped in a fire in her grandfather’s pub aged eight must be some of the reason she’s not working flat out as an actor. Nothing you see on screen can offer any alternative explanation – she’s that good.
The film is, to an extent, the story of her life, with a change of a detail here and there and the alteration of a name to protect the innocent, or guilty, with Knight playing a hospital care worker with a difficult background who falls in love with a suicidal tearaway (Esmé Creed-Miles), while trying to deal with the aftermath of the fire, which was years ago but has left its scars, obvious and otherwise. Not least the destroyed relationship with her father, who now has another family.
At one point early on in the relationship with bipolar Florence, Franky (Knight) matter-of-factly tells her the story of the night that altered her life, how it might have been arson, and who she suspects did it (all details that news reports back up).
The story is of Franky trying to escape her past, and escape – through sex, drugs, hard work – is the defining feature of Franky, who in Florence sees a young woman who might be an idealised version of herself, never mind that Florence has her own headful of woe.
As said, brilliant performances – Knight is particularly good at emotional intensity, and there’s a lot of it on offer here, whether it’s disaffection, bliss, boredom, all the emotions pushed into the red zone. Creed-Miles keeps up in a less demanding role and if she reminds you of Samantha Morton here and there, that’s because Morton is her mother (the actor Charlie Creed-Miles is her father).
Writer/director Polak seems to specialise in young women up against it. Hemel, her Dutch-language film from 2012, which starred Hannah Hoekstra as a sex-addict teenager with daddy issues, is massively underrated (ignore its IMDb rating – it’s nuts), and Dirty God was the story of a young woman dealing with the aftermath of an acid attack. There was also a directing stint on the TV show Hanna, which is more of the same, but with a thrillerish, superhero-ish nuance. It’s where Polak met Creed-Miles, who interacts with Knight brilliantly in scenes that feel like eavesdropping.
It takes a while for us, and for Franky, to realise that of the two of them she might, in fact, be the more sorted, and Creed-Miles’s acting is particularly excellent as Florence slides into a manic episode and her relationship with Franky hits the skids.
There is a touch of the misery memoir about it and some scenes are familiar enough to have come from other neo-kitchen-sinkers. But Polak’s side characters full of flavour – Florence’s brother, Franky’s sister (played by Knight’s real life sister Charlotte), Franky’s mother, Florence’s foster-mum, a sex-addict boyfriend, the thuggish local homophobes – steer it off the rocks.
It’s not a fun ride but Polak sets up the expectation of a catharsis. Will Franky get her shit together and either put the past behind her or engage with it properly? Can she discover a sense of purpose, the thing that gives life its meaning? If neither of those propositions fill you with anticipation, just watch it for the acting – it’s great.
Silver Haze – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
