Reflective Encounters

“The film opens as the twilight descends on Paignton in Devon, the dusk performing its daily ritual of transitioning the esplanade from the sun-bathed wholesomeness of the daytime to the neon-lit gloom of evening. As the day’s last stragglers slowly perambulate along the seafront, a young man strides past them with an urgent purpose, headed, we learn, to an addiction meeting. If the seaside offers the promise of fun for children and picturesque tranquillity for the elderly, for those in between it can be a dead-end, the shoreline representing both a geographic and a figurative terminus from which narcotic abandon might seem one of the few means of fleeting escape.

Seagull shares a kinship with other representations of such places, a curiously British cultural strain which encompasses both the dour melodrama of Morrissey’s daydreams of annihilation in ‘Everyday is Like Sunday’ and the Gothic seaside psychodrama of Rose Glass’s Saint Maud. So too does it recall David Seabrook’s All the Devils are Here, a disturbing tour of the Kent coastline and the thanatotic misfits which litter its past and haunt its present, a book whose title finds a faint echo in the film’s eventual surprise reveal: all the devils are hereindeed.”

— Jonathan Bygraves