52 Films by Women Vol 5. 31. MAKE UP (Director: Claire Oakley)
Set in a Cornish caravan park, the British film, Make Up , the first feature by writer-director Claire Oakley, is a ‘coming out’ story with a difference: it has the aesthetic of a horror movie. Questions are never satisfactorily answered. A fumigated caravan lit from within may have someone inside. Characters disappear then reappear. There are screams in the night and unexpected thumping. The camera (cinematography: Nick Cooke) tracks past empty caravans. Then there is the mysterious imprint of lip gloss on the mirror and red hair in a caravan. The eighteen-year-old protagonist Ruth (Molly Windsor) is perturbed. Oakley has met the first criteria of a good movie: show us something that we have not seen before; I cannot think of many films set in a caravan park. The unsettling tone is established from the outset. A huge night-time wave is seen heading toward towards us, ominous, threatening and powerful. Oakley cuts to a bead of light in the left of the frame, headlamps of a car,...