02/07/2019 - Ruth Platt’s new drama follows two British families who take an ill-fated holiday together in Freiburg, southwest Germany

It’s one of the most familiar templates for a contemporary-set drama: a middle-class family goes on holiday abroad, the mood becomes strained and histrionics flare. Ruth Platt’s new drama The Black Forest [+see also:
trailer
film profile] treads some of this terrain, but quickly distinguishes itself with patient storytelling and a sly sense of the tensions arising from Brexit. Platt’s second feature world-premiered last Friday at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, where it was nominated for the prestigious Michael Powell Award, given to an outstanding British film.

Writer-director Platt’s movie has a remarkably similar premise to Joanna Hogg’s first two features, Unrelated [+see also:
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film profile], although its tone is far warmer – Maren Ade’s Everyone Else [+see also:
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interview: Maren Ade
film profile] is a better analogue. Beth (Hattie Ladbury) and her Macedonian husband Darko (Aleksandar Mikic) are a middle-aged couple under various financial pressures, who decide to embark on a weeklong holiday to Germany’s Black Forest region with their two kids. Their plan is to share a holiday home with longtime friends Maggie (Sirine Saba) and Jack (Robert Hands), along with their more unruly brood of four young children. As we know from this mode of film, something is bound to upset their perfectly planned sojourn. But Platt decides to let suspense simmer for longer, and so her characters become more vivid and sympathetic as a result.

Her last film, The Lesson, was a violent, satirical horror, and she is currently developing another horror feature supported by the BFI. Appropriately, The Black Forest feels like a very astute horror film, but where nothing recognisable from the genre actually appears. The wounds are all emotional. The sensitive and perceptive Beth notices some discord amongst the other couple – Maggie keeps dashing into the other room to giggle at certain text messages. She’s also carelessly flirty with Beth’s spouse Darko, in a scene featuring just the two of them, taking in a magic-hour sunset with a glass of wine. Mirroring Platt’s own background, Beth has a career as a theatre-maker, which is just beginning to flourish after some setbacks, but this masks another fault line between her and Darko, who has just left a lucrative job in property management.

Although described as a “micro-budget” film by its director, The Black Forest still supplies much visual splendour with its picturesque location shooting, taking in the lush Baden-Württemberg woods, urban areas and a quaint fairground without seeming the least bit touristic. Whilst the adults labour in emotional gridlock, the six children join up together like a secondary, auxiliary family. This bliss is captured in montage sequences that earn their place in the film’s slender running time and don’t feel like padding: one GoPro shot from the fairground portion, taken from the tip of a rollercoaster carriage, is the film’s visual highlight.

The Black Forest deserves an audience and further festival exposure – British indies on this level sometimes struggle to get noticed. But this film is another confident step into the limelight for Ruth Platt.

The Black Forest is a UK production. It was produced by Darko Stavrik for Urban Fox Films.