Shimmering with menace and mystery, Bridgend takes an ongoing tragedy and imbues it with the timeless quality of a pitch-dark fairy tale. Set in a small town in Wales where over 70 people have committed suicide since 2007, most coming from the same cohort of teenagers, Bridgend is the fiction debut of documentarian Jeppe Rønde, who takes a total departure from a documentary aesthetic (a documentary on the town already exists). Rønde focuses not on facts but on feelings, giving an impressionistic depiction of a phenomenon that will always remain to some degree inexplicable.
After spending most of her life in Bristol, Sara (Hannah Murray) returns to her birthplace of Bridgend, Wales, along with her single father Dave (Steven Waddington), a policeman seeking to “solve” the spate of teen suicides. Dave is frustrated by his failure to make inroads with the close-knit and secretive teens, and doubly frustrated that Sara gradually joins the fold, even as one of the most popular teens hangs himself in the woods. As she falls for Jamie (Josh O’Connor), Sara is fully drawn into their insular world, drinking in the same primeval forest where the suicides occur, where a night out might involve tempting death in the form of an oncoming train and the most important virtue is all-consuming loyalty to the group.
The sound design is excellent, creating a palpable tension throughout as sounds as varied as wind rushing through trees to sirens shift seamlessly from soothing to nerve-wracking. There is a Lynchian energy at work here; the primal undercurrent of the forest scenes, and the sense of atavistic abandon in the hearts of the seemingly normal teens recall the darker aspects of Twin Peaks while the surreal beckoning of a slow tracking shot down mossy rail tracks into darkness echoes similar shots in Wild at Heart and Lost Highway. The persistent darkness of the frame and the sensory intoxication of the film recalls Under the Skin, but where that film featured an alien entity preying on the (somewhat) innocent, Bridgend has an alien idea, a death drive, lodged in the group psyche of the kids, corrupting the innocent from within. The world of the village is stiflingly insular; Jamie notes on a night out that they’re going to the same bar where his grandfather drank his entire life. Sara’s former home of Bristol is the only other location ever even mentioned and none of the teens harbor any real consciousness of the outside world. Even the internet, usually a window to the outer world, is turned inward –the only view of it is an online chat room where the kids use aliases to discuss themselves and their fallen friends. It functions as an eerily prophetic collective subconscious, bubbling over with discontent and death.
Bridgend will likely be divisive, as it takes an audacious approach to an incredibly sensitive subject. Rønde spent years in Wales hearing the stories of teens and his efforts to understand the local suicidal impulse might look like reckless glamorization to some or bother those who want a logical “answer.” Bridgend starts with a mystery that Dave thinks he can solve like a whodunit, but even while Rønde illustrates something of an emotional logic in the deaths, he ties it to even larger, fundamentally unknowable mysteries of life and death, creating a film both seductive and tragic, a unique and haunting experience.
