It’s not normal to regularly contemplate mortality in your twenties, to ask questions about where we might go after we die and whether any part of our legacy will even matter in the years following. But for gay men in the 1980s, death was everywhere.
In David Turpin’s intermittently impactful debut Ancestors, the director tries to make a connection with those men who lived through the very worst years of the Aids crisis. Turpin, born in 1982, might not have the first-hand experience but he bears the scars passed on from generation to generation and like many young gay men coming of age in the years after, likely experienced a watered down version of the shame and fear those before him once felt.
His film is about how bridges are built between past and future, living and dead, old and young, and how those who have been pushed out of society work about trying to create and sustain their own. Set in a foggy, ghostly London in 1988, Turpin’s dreamy and mysterious film is trying to cast a spell (he has referred to it as a “séance” in interviews) and it’s one that works incredibly well at times and wears off far too easily at others. As with many a first movie, there’s a lot thrown at the wall here with scrappy ambition prioritised over laser focus and while that’s admirable, it can also be a little frustrating.
What’s most consistent is a mesmerising performance from Éanna Hardwicke, the Irish actor who was also one of the best things about last year’s Toronto film festival, playing Roy Keane in underseen World Cup workplace drama Saipan. Again he brings real, combustible angst to the role but here it’s of a far different kind, aimed at the rapidly disintegrating world around him and the one person he wants to save from disintegrating with it. He plays Beau, a gay man working in a caff owned by “Auntie” Maurice (Rupert Everett), an old queen who collects both framed pictures of the female actors he idolises as well as young strays. The latest of whom is Tiny (Jack Wolfe), a 20-year-old in need of work. When Beau later sees him cruising in the park and finds out he has nowhere to stay, he brings him back to stay in an apartment shared with his best friend, Shell (a luminous Jessica Reynolds).
Refreshingly there’s no sexual tension between the pair (Beau says early on that Tiny isn’t his type) and instead they become friends, a far more compelling and under-explored gay male dynamic. Like Maurice did with him, Beau also feels a sense of responsibility for Tiny, an overwhelming weight at such a grim time and after Tiny reveals that he is positive, the objective changes from keeping him safe to keeping him alive. The film jumps back and forth in time, and to other places, as Tiny goes missing and Beau must try to find him. Early on Beau tries to get Tiny to read his collection of Jean Genet novels but he tells him that he isn’t interested in tales of detectives and instead prefers “love stories and ghost stories”. Turpin also has little interest in the fact-finding grind of actually tracking someone down and more about the love between the pair and the ghosts that surround them.
For a film that plays with reality, dreams, nightmares, the past, the future and the afterlife and slips between timelines and from colour to black and white, it often works best in its more grounded conversational scenes. His direction might get overly precious but Turpin’s dialogue is natural and direct and we never doubt Hardwicke’s authenticity. The film around him can meander a little, in its worst moments feeling like a short that’s been expanded beyond its means, and while some of the atmosphere is entirely enveloping, sometimes the visuals can be a little ropey. There are misfiring gambits like a transfixing but inconsequential Christina Hendricks as a golden age actor who comes to life and a few too many underwhelming musical interludes at a local gay bar (save for one wrenching cover of Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren which is wisely played again at the end). I was moved by so much – a picture of Tiny added to an expanding wall filled with other gay men who got sick, Beau’s anxiousness over whether he might also have it and how intimate he should then be with Shell or Maurice, how Beau grapples with the idea of hopelessness without despair – but then alienated by so many others.
The last act hinges on a more conventional reveal that feels a little at odds with the stranger, fuzzier movie that Turpin seems more focused on making. It doesn’t quite have the gut-punch impact it should, a more conceptually interesting idea than an emotionally effective one, but the very last scene does bring us back under that spell. In its swirl of emotions, ideas and styles, Ancestors can get a little lost in the mist but when, in its finest moments, it all clears, there’s something haunting in front of us.
Ancestors is premiering at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution
