This is Not a Love Song

British film is urgently in need of new blood. Bille Eltringham provides it by taking a story that, at first sight, is fairly mainstream an unexpected event changes two petty thieves into murderers and then she lets her hair down.Fugitives Spike and Heaton form an unlikely couple. Heaton is efficient and inscrutable: someone who makes people instinctively afraid. On the other hand, Spike is hectic, childlike, unstoppable: more like someone you’d worry about. But when Spike commits a terrible crime, Heaton helps him. Together they try to escape from the furious farmers who pursue them, straight across the unknown North of England, in the hope of reaching the big city. Against the threatening backdrop of marshes, heathland and dark forests, the two become increasingly exhausted.Eltringham makes creative use of the possibilities of the digital camera. This provides the film, shot in only two weeks, with a great deal of energy and makes it possible for the director to get very close to her excellent actors. Those actors (including Kenny Glenaan, the director of Gas Attack, see that film) were already cast before the final script was completed. In addition, Eltringham succeeds in turning the barren landscape into an impressive third protagonist in the film.