Scarborough is a 2019 drama about two couples who spend a life-changing weekend at the seaside resort town of Scarborough.
At the posh seaside Hotel Metropole in Scarborough, Liz (Jodhi May) checks in, looking a little reluctant but somewhat anticipatory. She’s soon joined by Daz (Jordan Bolger), who is, we learn, her student, a sixteen-year-old boy looking to get laid. Down the hall, Aiden (Edward Hogg), another teacher, arrives for a secret rendezvous with Beth (Jessica Barden), a promiscuous sixteen-year-old girl, who is eager to sexually satisfy as well. They are all here for the weekend, the two couples bound by their acts of sex but wrung dry by the consequences as they try to have some normality in relationships that are anything but. Then reality comes knocking and worlds fall apart.
Based on the play by Fiona Evans, director Barnaby Southcombe‘s Scarborough is decidedly controversial, with older teachers involved with students who are technically children, the film not skirting that issue, putting a lot of weight on the guilt both Liz and Aiden have for the younger people they are hopelessly drawn to. We are positioned as observers and meant to judge, the story looking to humanize the impacts of what it happening even as we wonder why about everything in it. Beth and Daz are of course immature (she still bounces around with a stuffed teddy bear) but wanting to feel older and while together, the teens could explore that, yet paired with those who brought them, is only upsetting. And that’s the point.
The film runs in parallel, each of the two stories shadowing the other, often with like dialogue and action, the teachers mirrors of each other as they face the truth of what they are doing. It shapes this as escalation, where the powerful physical attraction of these couples puts them on a troubling first plank before leading them out into heavy seas of remorse, fear, betrayal, and shame. It’s a classic spin where a torrid affair satisfies a primal need but then runs circles around the agonizing emotional aftermath. And then more.
It’s not easy to watch, the film rightly making it impossible to find any sympathy for Liz and Aiden, the two already in relationships with people more age appropriate, the crimes they have committed hanging over their heads while things go from bad to worse. What possible solutions can come from such dangerous choices? Southcombe is delicate with the adaptation, keeping this heavily centered on the two couples only, their worlds seemingly populated by themselves, which gives much of the film a stage-like feel. It is the women in both stories that have the most impact, May giving Liz a tragic despair to her need to feel something from Daz, her twenty-year relationship with someone else leaving her hollow. And Barden (who you’ll recognize from the Netflix series End of the F**king World) is astonishing, a powerfully potent presence that leaves Beth a young woman you won’t soon forget.
This doesn’t come packed with a larger social message or some saturated message that isn’t already inherent in the plot, instead just the harrowing collision of four people who should never be together. It’s beautifully photographed by Ian Liggett, though it never once romanticizes what’s happening, keeping it always disconcerting. There is a twist in all this, but nothing I’ll hint further about, only to say it earns its keep. This is not a happy story, nor should it be, but it’s heartbreaking nonetheless and ends where it should, all the questions not on us but entirely with them.