Ben Whishaw on a frightening journey in Surge

SURGE
Directed by Aneil Karia
Certificate: 15
☆☆☆

THE ability for art to describe an interior thought process that you can recognise is a crucial element of Aneil Karia’s clever story of an individual’s breakdown.

Like Patrick Hamilton’s novel Hangover Square; Michael Douglas’s acting in Falling Down; or the LSD-soaked paintings of Ralph Steadman, Karia’s film Surge is a portrayal of how a mind can reinterpret reality.

Joseph (Ben Whishaw) is the miserable low-paid airport security worker, frisking holiday-makers and asking them to take off their belts.

It becomes a matter of some disgust – and is a harrowing introduction into what Joseph is experiencing.

Ian Gelder and Ellie Haddington play Joseph’s parents, and as with Whishaw, create a shivering, claustrophobic story.

The opening scenes are powerful. We follow Joseph as he heads into work at Stansted Airport, and then watch his day unfold.

Quietly spoken, as if by even squeaking out words will bring unwanted attention, poor Joseph aches to be invisible.

Whishaw introduces his character through a sense of something deeply uncomfortable lurking inside. A search he has to conduct on an elderly traveller is the first of many moments when you feel an emotional dam inside is about to burst.

We then follow Joseph home, and meet his parents. In Karia’s hands, even such a simple journey suddenly becomes with a sense of unhappy foreboding.

Joseph has a crush on his colleague Lily (Jasmine Jobson), and his feelings for her add another twisting sense of turmoil, made clear by, for example, a teeth-itching scene involving a fork at a canteen table.

Joseph falls apart at work, and then sets off on a trip through a door in his mind that drastically colours his actions and responses. You know something violent and unpleasant is about to occur – the increasing tempo of his insanity is clear – and when it does come, Whishaw’s performance makes the implausible plausible.

It is helped by some original and dramatic scene-setting by Karia, the nervous tics and brooding demeanour of the lead, and superb supporting roles by Haddington and Gelder, make it all the more frightening.

Karia has managed to create a narrative arc that has the key elements of a thriller, a cliffhanger, but done in a rhythmic and intelligent way.

There is a constant sense of something big and nasty lurking round the next corner.

Surge is a well-mapped and frightening journey.