Venice Film Festival: The Goob - film review

Guy Myhill’s debut film is loose, rangy, spontaneous in feel and appealingly in love with the core of East Anglia
Breaking free: Liam Walpole in The Goob
David Sexton29 August 2014

The coming-of-age story here is familiar enough: what’s not been committed to film before like this is the flat, fenny landscape and endless skies of agricultural mid-Norfolk, far from the chocolate-box gems of the coast.

Sixteen-year-old Goob (newcomer Liam Walpole, of Dereham, wonderfully lanky and ferrety) is trying to come to terms with the fact that his soft mum (Sienna Guillory, another Norfolk native, who knew) has taken up with a right thug, Gene (Sean Harris, another local, best known as the cranky geologist in Prometheus, here giving Peter Mullan a run for his money as a nasty piece of rough). Gene enjoys stock-car racing over at Swaffham, free-range shagging (not restricted to Goob’s mum), exploiting the seasonal workers there to pick pumpkins and intimidating Goob and his pals.

Goob, though, after a lot of moody racing round the fens on his moped, lucks out with punky but sweet-natured migrant worker Eva (Marama Corlett, cute as a button) and finds first love of his own. Through the hot summer they drink, they toke, they have an all-night barbecue on the endless prairie and she tells him to get out of Gene’s reach.

Guy Myhill’s debut film is loose, rangy, spontaneous in feel and appealingly in love with the core of East Anglia. We’ve seen children growing up often enough in provincial France or the American South, but never here, not like this. For that alone, The Goob is worthwhile. That daft title, seeming to promise a space-monster spoof, is a bit of a handicap, perhaps. But then anything beginning or ending in “Norfolk” might have felt just a little too Partridge.

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