Submarine (2011)

Richard Ayoade's Submarine arrives from 2010 with the confidence of a first feature that knows what it is: a small, chilly, funny study of a Welsh fifteen-year-old who believes his interior life is a public monument. Oliver Tate narrates his own life as though composing a memoir for a reader he despises. He monitors his parents' marriage through a dimmer switch. He pursues Jordana, who is sharper and sadder than he is, and he fails her at the moment she needs him most. The film is shot in natural light on 35mm, scored by Alex Turner, and it ends with two teenagers standing several inches deep in the sea. That is its whole ambition, and it is enough.

For the purposes of this classification, the ledger comes back empty. The cast is white and Welsh, and the one character of East Asian descent, Kim-Lin, moves through the story with no thematic freight attached to her whatsoever. There is no queer subtext, no feminist argument, no racial consciousness, no climate anxiety, no critique of capital, no body politics, no neurodivergence framed as identity, and no revision of the historical record, since there is no history here to revise. Oliver is eccentric and introspective, but the film treats this as temperament, not diagnosis. Nobody lectures. Nobody turns to the audience to explain the lesson. The picture is far too busy watching a boy humiliate himself to instruct anyone about anything.

This is not a deficiency of seriousness. It is an absence of the specific cultural vocabulary that now defines the cinema of this decade, and Submarine predates it by a comfortable margin. Its concerns are adolescent shame, the comedy of parental collapse, and the difficulty of apologizing to someone you have wronged. Old concerns, handled with a light hand. We are left with a modest, well-made film that resists every category we are obliged to apply to it, and a long afternoon of entering zeroes into the empty column. Such is the work.

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