British filmmaker Duane Hopkins arrives on the feature-length scene having being touted by some as “the new Lynne Ramsay”, something of a lazy label routinely applied to any young British director working in the confines of social realism. Set in Hopkins' native Cotswolds, though this really could be anywhere in rural England, Better Things focuses on the lives of a small set of mostly unconnected individuals: a young heroin user whose girlfriend has just died of an overdose, a pair of recently split teenagers, a reunited elderly couple readjusting to life together, and a young housebound agoraphobe whose elderly grandmother has been moved in to her family's home.
Hard drug use is prevalent amongst the younger characters, but although it can hardly be said to be romanticized here, it is presented as another escape from drab everyday realities, as much as fast drives down country lanes late at night, playing video games or fumbled, inexperienced sexual encounters. Boredom, the inability to articulate truth and emotions to close friends and partners, and the frustrations of living in a dead-end town all conspire to present drug use not as a glamorous lifestyle choice nor a squalid retreat but merely a choice that has been made by desperate individuals. The use of a largely non-professional cast, drawn from the region and many of whom having experienced drug problems in the past, gives a feeling that the filmmaker is not being judgmental or condescending towards them or their characters.
The middle-aged are notable by their absence in this setting, and the film largely successfully illustrates the commonality between the feeling of isolation and of being trapped between old and young: the old confined by physical frailty and resistance to change, the young by geography, fear or their own poor economic prospects. Hopkins has a background in short filmmaking, and early on the apparent disconnectedness of the characters and their seeming lack of development do make the parallel stories feel somewhat like separate projects sandwiched together; as the film wears on, however, there is a noticeable convergence, most obviously in one scene in a park where two of the characters' stories are beautifully juxtaposed, underlining the central thesis of common isolation across the age gap. There are no easy escapes and answers to these situations, but their possibility is more than hinted at by the close.
I always notice when traveling through parts of rural England that the dominant, most noticeable objects protruding from the flat landscapes are the spires of the country churches, whose function I imagine in these settings to be closer to what they were many years ago in comparison to the modern role of their urban counterparts. Better Things begins with a funeral service and returns near the end of the story to the same place, yet organized religion and spirituality in general are otherwise absent from the lives of these characters; given the theme of mortality running throughout the film, and the constant searching for something 'other', whether through drugs or physical love, there is clearly the invitation to ponder the implications of the absence of a god from these people's lives.
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