Powerless Matt Daniels UK 2006
An odd feeling washes over one at the beginning of Powerless. Something’s wrong with the voices of the actors. Probably only a British audience would pick this up but all the accents are in Received Pronunciation or middle class English. Banished off-screen years ago as unfeasibly naff by the style police, it’s at first jarring to hear this manner of speech spoken so casually but it soon dissolves into the fabric of the film. This is who the characters are, so why should we somehow be expecting media-friendly accents such as Irish or Geordie? A minor point to mention at first perhaps, but just one of Powerless’ several idiosyncratic features that give the film a distinctive air.
Director Matt Daniel’s film has a premise in common with Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf in depicting civil disaster socially in deeply personal terms. Society is devastated by an anonymous terrorist attack that leaves a close-knit family stranded in their country home. The terrorists have knocked out the national grid leaving the country bereft of electricity, hence (in part) the title of the film. Like many other post-apocalyptic dramas (from Night of the Living Dead onwards) it’s really all about how the survivors cope with one-another in the aftermath, and with all the emotional baggage they bring along with themselves: again, hence the title of the film. As a few characters leave and arrive, the bulk of Powerless is all about a family dealing with their predicament in splendidly shot rural isolation with the past haunting one of them particularly via flashbacks. Given the ease with which Powerless assumes its naturalistic atmosphere it’s a shame though that the ending can’t match up to the rest of the film but like most other post-apocalyptic survival dramas it run similarly aground and doesn’t take the easy option of bleakness.
Unusually given the film’s origin, Powerless is remarkably well scored, gelling the final product together with a finesse that pushes the story along at the occasional risk of turning it into an episode of Dawson’s Creek, where characters spend long minutes of screen time looking gorgeously broody in time to the music.
In true guerrilla style Daniels has cast an actual set of siblings in the main roles tapping into the existing relationship between the actors well. This really is a family who love and hate (and all the rest) each other and it shows in each and every bout of bickering and reconciliation. Particularly this ploy works well in getting past expositive dialogue that explains what’s going on because the sisters are so convincing when they interact. So much so that quibbles about accents are quickly forgotten in the heat of this well crafted and occasionally disturbing parable.
