Avis des critiques

But for all the kitchen sink magic hour lyricism on display, The Goob sometimes struggles to shake off the nagging feeling that what you’re watching is essentially a short film which has been padded out to feature length... Those issues aside, there’s still much to admire. Myhill’s strong sense of mood and locale mark him out as a filmmaker to watch and offers a hint that we may have our own Ramin Bahrani equivalent further down the line.

[The film] is often grim... But Myhill’s oblique, absorbing film also has episodes of transcendent beauty, thanks in part to its hypnotic evocation of the landscape of this curious corner of England, and thanks even more to Liam Walpole, who plays Goob with luminous, disarming, gawky grace.

Filmed on location entirely in rural Norfolk, The Goob ostensibly borrows heavily from the Andrea Arnold school of contemporary working class miserablism. Stylistically and tonally, however, it blends the codeine reverie of Harmony Korine's Gummo with the cold-shower realism of early Ken Loach, although perhaps the film it best evokes is Shane Meadows' 1999 drama, A Room for Romeo¬ Brass.

A really intelligent essay in classic Brit social realism, well-acted and beautifully photographed by cinematographer Simon Tindall... The Goob inhabits the location with confidence and a shrewd sense of place. An impressive feature debut for director Guy Myhill.

The lack of momentum may be appropriate for the story and the setting, but Myhill’s refusal to seek emotional closure can be frustrating. Add an overdetermined air of poverty-trap bleakness and some poorly developed female characters, and the result is a film that never quite achieves its potential.

The bleakly beautiful Norfolk backdrops subvert cliché, but the characters’ obeisance to [Sean Harris's] tinpot tyrant Gene leaves an inexplicable hole at the heart of the film.

Dropping the viewer straight into the action without clunky exposition, the film delivers a vivid slice of the life centering on the Goob (Liam Walpole), as he's called by his family, a lanky teenager whose summer is stained by the omnipresent shadow of his mother's violent, womanizing sociopath of a live-in boyfriend, Womak (Sean Harris).

The Goob announces the arrival of a new British talent worth keeping tabs on... It is the moments of pure quiet in the countryside contrasted with raucous parties and joyriding in beaten up cars that makes [the film] an unpredictable watch and an exhilarating journey.

There’s nothing new about portraying hopeless and repressed provincial youth or the open hostility between a son and his mother’s new boyfriend on screen. Nevertheless, Guy Myhill’s movie succeeds in creating unexpected tension and suspense: you expect that at any moment something terrible might happen.

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.

[The Goob] is rich in atmosphere but dramatically undernourished and stippled with cliche... The film’s strong suit is its insider’s feel for the landscape and working-class milieu depicted. However, Myhill’s script picks up plot strands and characters and then casually discards them in a way that’s probably meant to be arty and oblique but often comes across as inattentive.

A heady blend of the styles of the Dardennes and Clio Barnard/Ken Loach, [The Goob] offers little new in terms of narrative format, but the performances are all spot on and it offers up a nicely left-field coming-of-age story.