Poster

Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2010)

Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2010)

</aside>

<aside> 💯

EMPIRE — ✪✪✪✪

Oliver Tate (Roberts) is besotted with Jordana (Paige), a feisty girl in his class. Yet, as he embarks on his first relationship, he also frets over that of his parents (Hawkins and Taylor), a situation exacerbated by one of his mum's exes (Considine) moving in down the road.

Before Submarine, Richard Ayoade’s steps towards the big screen were tentative tiptoes: little cameos in the little-seen likes of Festival and Bunny And The Bull. It doesn’t help that, despite winning over many with his man-robot antics in The IT Crowd as über-nerd Moss, playing alongside Chris O’Dowd’s mildly more worldly Roy, acting is hardly his forte. Indeed, it is behind the camera that Ayoade has finally found his cinematic feet. And, boy, can he dance.

Submarine is, simply, a joy. A joy jostled by the comedy of discomfort, sure, but like early Wes Anderson (a comparison that no doubt makes Ayoade squirm, but his film bears it well), its quirkier and darker tendencies are leavened by the warmth and likability of his characters; Ayoade even manages to make you sympathise with Paddy Considine’s mullet-crested bullshit guru — a man so self-absorbingly ignorant he can tell a room of people that “light is the most important gift we have from the universe” and believe it.

Besides flagging up his love for the medium through savvy visual references and some well-played fourth wall-breaking (listen out for the voiceover gag about crane shots and zooms), Ayoade has also cast his debut perfectly. And we’re not just talking about the adults, including two of the UK’s best actors (Considine and Sally Hawkins) and one of Australia’s most underrated (Noah Taylor). Craig Roberts (an oddly appealing facial blend of James McAvoy and Martin Freeman) and Yasmin Paige (whose Jordana is burly yet vulnerable) make a wonderful couple, his hesitant introversion balanced by her fiery extroversion. Oliver spends most of the film hanging in doorways, while Jordana is the kind of girl who prefers to slam doors.

Both are considerably assisted by Ayoade’s humdinger of a script (adapted from Joe Dunthorne’s novel). Their virginity-losing date, for example, begins with Jordana snapping, “Thanks for living up a fucking hill”, and concludes with her warning, “Don’t get cocky.” Meanwhile, Oliver talks of brief hat phases and routine searches of his parents’ bedroom, while at one point poignantly reflecting, with truly adolescent angstiness, that “we’re all travelling under the radar and there’s nothing we can do about it”. Well, one thing is for certain: Ayoade’s time under the radar is well and truly over.

A perfect blend of cool, quirky comedy and warm-hearted drama, crafted with such poise that it should see the transcendence of Ayoade from TV nerd-comic to true big-screen talent.

</aside>

<aside> 🌎

Contexts Of Film

Context

Social context

The film presents mid-1980s South Wales as a place where teenage life feels geographically and emotionally boxed-in, so romance, status, and family drama become “everything”.
The film centres a socially awkward, self-mythologising teenage boy, presenting adolescence as a period of intense self-surveillance, performative maturity, and fear of humiliation.
The film presents family life as unstable rather than protective, with parental depression, loneliness, and marital breakdown shaping the emotional environment of the home.
The film presents school as a petty social ecosystem where reputation travels fast, bullying is casual, and desire is inseparable from embarrassment and gossip.
The film presents first sexual experience as an anxious status project rather than a purely romantic milestone, linking masculinity to performance and control.
The film presents mental health as ordinary and often unspoken, using the father’s withdrawal and fragility as background pressure rather than a solved “issue”.
In mid-1980s Wales, the film’s background mood can be linked to economic insecurity and community pressure following industrial decline, which shaped family stress, aspiration, and a sense of limited routes out.

Historical context

The story is set in the mid-1980s, a period marked by late Cold War tension and a UK culture that often mixed cynicism, irony, and pop spectacle.
The film’s 1980s setting is communicated through pre-smartphone teenage life, where relationships, rumours, and conflict play out face-to-face, on landlines, and in public spaces rather than online.
The setting draws on post-industrial Britain, where many Welsh communities lived with the aftereffects of economic restructuring, reduced job security, and changing family stability.
The mid-1980s setting sits within the Thatcher era, when deindustrialisation, privatisation, and reduced state support accelerated economic change across the UK, including Wales.
In Wales, the closure and contraction of coal, steel, and heavy industry during this period contributed to unemployment, out-migration, and long-term shifts in community identity.
The film uses a retrospective period setting to frame adolescence as memory, with the past treated as a curated emotional landscape rather than a strictly realist record.

Cultural context

The film sits in a British coming-of-age tradition but filters it through heightened art-film style, treating ordinary life as a series of composed moments and narrative chapters.
The film blends youth romance with deadpan humour and melancholy, building a tone where sincerity and irony coexist.
The film’s use of voiceover presents teenage identity as a story the protagonist tells about themself, aligning adolescence with fantasy, performance, and self-deception.
The soundtrack uses original songs by Alex Turner to create an intimate inner-monologue feel, turning indie music into an emotional narrator rather than background decoration.
Alex Turner is best known as the lead singer and songwriter of the Arctic Monkeys, a major 2000s British indie band, so his involvement gives the film a recognisable indie-cultural “stamp”.
The Arctic Monkeys association positions the film within a wider UK indie culture of the period, where music, fashion, and ironic romanticism overlap and help define a particular idea of “youth cool”.
The film draws on a contemporary indie aesthetic often associated with carefully arranged colour, symmetrical framing, and stylised detail, linking British teen life to an international indie look.

Political context

The film’s mid-1980s setting connects to a UK period of sharp political division and economic policy that reshaped working lives and communities, which sits behind the film’s mood of social constriction.
Thatcherism describes a political approach associated with Margaret Thatcher’s governments, emphasising free-market policy, privatisation, weakening of trade-union power, and reduced state intervention.
In Wales, these policies are often linked to the decline of heavy industry and to political tensions around jobs, community stability, and whether national policy served regions outside London and the South East.
The film treats politics as indirect but present, with power felt through economic insecurity, parental stress, and the limited horizons of a small community rather than through explicit debate.
The film presents authority figures as background noise rather than moral anchors, implying a world where teenagers feel largely unmanaged and must invent their own rules.
The film’s focus on private life over public institutions reflects a broader tendency in coming-of-age cinema to show politics as lived pressure rather than spoken ideology.

Institutional context

The film is a UK independent production associated with Film4 and Warp Films, placing it in a British industry space where lower budgets, regional settings, and distinctive authorial style are institutionally valued.
Warp Films is a UK production company that built its reputation on distinctive, regionally grounded British stories with a strong authorial voice, often mixing social realism with stylisation and dark comedy.
As a Warp Films project, the film reflects an institutional preference for “non-heritage” Britain, using overlooked landscapes and everyday spaces as central cinematic material.
The film’s production and financing use a typical UK independent model, combining multiple backers and public-facing film bodies alongside established production labels.
The film adapts Joe Dunthorne’s novel, reflecting an institutional pipeline where contemporary literature is developed into mid-budget British cinema with prestige indie branding.
Richard Ayoade’s role as writer-director reflects a UK media ecosystem where talent moves between television performance, comedy, music video work, and feature filmmaking, bringing an already-formed persona into cinema.
Ayoade’s comic-cultural profile encourages a tone that is controlled, awkward, and self-aware, aligning the film with a broader UK tradition of deadpan humour and cringe-inflected adolescence.
Chris Morris is a prominent UK satirist and filmmaker who is strongly associated with Warp Films’ wider output, which helps place Submarine in the same institutional space as UK comedy with an edge.
The film’s festival life and international distribution position it as an exportable version of British youth culture that does not rely on heritage imagery or London glamour.
The presence of a recognisable comic performer-director (Richard Ayoade) reflects a UK media landscape where television talent crosses into feature filmmaking as a route to financing, marketing, and audience curiosity.

Technological context

The film’s look relies on controlled colour design and compositional precision, showing how digital post-production and colour grading support memory tones and mood shifts without needing spectacle.
The film uses a conventional widescreen theatrical aspect ratio (1.85:1), supporting balanced framing of characters within carefully organised domestic and street spaces.
The film uses Super 8 and home-video style imagery as a deliberate technological “quotation”, borrowing the look of amateur formats to make romance feel like a remembered highlight reel rather than everyday life.
The Super 8 and home-video look signals nostalgia through visible texture, softer detail, and “imperfect” image quality, so the film can mark certain moments as emotionally elevated and curated.
The film uses the Super 8 and home-video style most strongly in montage sequences, where editing compresses time and turns a relationship into a sequence of iconic fragments rather than continuous realism.
The use of retro-looking inserts creates contrast with the film’s cleaner contemporary image, separating Oliver’s fantasy of love from the messier, flatter look of ordinary domestic life.
The retro inserts show how a modern film can simulate older consumer formats through post-production, using image processing to imitate analogue grain, colour response, and home-movie movement.
The soundtrack design foregrounds voiceover and indie songs as narrative technology, using recording, mixing, and music placement to make interior thought feel continuous and authoritative.
The film uses montage and stylised inserts (including home-video and Super 8-style material) to imitate analogue textures, showing how contemporary production can simulate older formats to signal nostalgia and subjectivity. </aside>

<aside> 💡

Idea Bucket

⏱️ Coming soon…

</aside>

<aside> 📺

YouTube Playlist

Submarine

</aside>

<aside> 🦉

Scavengings

Untitled

Reeder - Shared Feed

Links

</aside>