Rent Body of Water (2020)

Powerful and sensitive study of severe anorexia - Body of Water review by PD

This one's a very hard watch at times, but by-and-large director Lucy Brydon is successful at giving us an honest, sensitive portrayal of severe anorexia.

Unusually for a film on this subject, her protagonist is not a troubled adolescent but a 30-something single mother, Stephanie (Sian Brooke), who finds her efforts to reconnect with her long-suffering but totally out-of-her depth mother Susan (Amanda Burton) and spiky 15-year-old daughter Pearl (the superb Fabienne Piolini-Castle) invariably come to grief. Brooke is excellent, giving us a thoroughly convincing display of a woman's internal demons and how she is constantly teetering on the edge, although the (rather important) backstory of her (presumably traumatic) former life as a war photographer is left to our imagination.

It doesn't always come off - the scenes involving her 'relationship' with a distinctly unprofessional nurse are rather weak, and the group therapy sessions resort to cliche at times, but some scenes are truly heart-rending, notably an extended sequence in which she gorges alone, in silent desperation. Brydon’s restrained, unmelodramatic screenplay, which doesn’t attempt to psychoanalyse Stephanie, works well with Darran Bragg's detached cinematography. Powerful stuff.

Powerful & Intelligent Social Drama - Body of Water review by GI

A sobering and intelligent drama centred on a woman with anorexia. Sian Brooke plays Stephanie, a woman struggling with drugs, depression and an eating disorder. She returns to her family after seven months in rehab' and tries to reconnect with her troubled teenage daughter who has been living with Stephanie's frosty mother (Amanda Burton). She is planning her wedding to her new partner and insists that Stephanie and her daughter are bridesmaids. There's an excruciating scene of trying on the awful dresses made worse by Stephanie's emaciated state. This film addresses a subject often overlooked and it does so with great honesty and although it's a melancholy film it does pack an emotional punch. It shows the combination of issues that give rise to physical illness like anorexia and how the intolerance and ignorance of loved ones can make matters so much worse. An interesting social drama with a strong central performance and well worth checking out.

Tough subject, complex story - Body of Water review by AER

It's an interesting film where you can't warm to the characters but not through any fault of the movie. The performances are uniformly excellent in this film about a Canvey Island family that centres around an anorexic woman struggling with drug addiction and her re-assimilation back into family life. The characters are brittle, unlikeable, and all too real in this slice of life that rarely gets shown with a straight face in cinema. It shows that anorexia is not just a teenage problem and it also shows the effects that such an affliction can have on your life. Tough to watch at times, it's only downside is that it juggles a few too many plot points to fully process the level of emotion coming through, and also some of the directorial flourishes are a bit unwelcome. It's a brave film and a unique one.