In the years 2007-2012, 79 young people commited suicide in the small town Bridgend in Wales. No one knows the reason behind the suicides which are still happening to this day. This true yet horrific event is what inspired the film Bridgend and if you thought that this alone would make the film interesting, well you are mistaken (and so was I).
The film begins with a really creepy scene of a young man who has hanged himself from a tree in a very eerie forest. A german sheperd finds him and starts to howl. The protagonist of Bridgend however, is Sara [Hannah Murray (Game of Thrones)] who moves to Bridgend with her dad Dave (Steven Waddington) who is a police officer. Sara is a teenager that immediately attracts the attention of every boy as she is "the new girl in town". Soon, she starts to hang around with her classmates and notices their strange behaviour. They always spend their time in the forest, swim naked in the lake (an image that brings to mind dead floating bodies) and put flowers on the spot where their friend commited suicide. They all seem fixated with the idea of death and mortality and while they don't like the adults of their town, they never want to leave and they don't allow to anyone from their group to leave. Sara at first keeps herself distant from all this, but as she connects more and more with that peculiar group she gets affected too.
At the same time, her father tries to solve the mystery behind the constant suicides but can't manage to get to the end of it. He is also terrified for his daughter as he knows that the people in the town might have a really bad impact on her.
All this sounds quite interesting but boy was it not. The film takes a long time to unravel (for the sake of creating atmoshere I suppose) but even when it does, it leaves many questions unanswered and it creates even more. If it were a documentary, or a dramatization of the true events, a simple record of the facts would suffice. But as this is a film based on the inexplicable suicides of teenagers, some sympathising characters are needed. And we get none. Instead the audience never understands the reason behind the irritating protagonists' actions and even though this is true to the fact that no suicide note has ever been found on the bodies, it just doesn't work on film.
Bridgend is annoyingly slow and one could only praise its constant feeling of threat and its riveting atmoshere. But in the end, and after a dream-like ending scene that added even more to the pile of incomprehensible information that I had gathered during the movie, all I could ask myself was: "what was I watching?"
Bridgend was shown on the 6th and the 9th day of the AIFF.
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