Melbourne International Film Festival 2019: HAPPY NEW YEAR, COLIN BURSTEAD

If there’s one thing most cinema-goers can agree on it is that their family is weird. It might be good-weird, it might be bad-weird, but all families have quirks, secrets, rituals, habits, and a common language. In real life, you don’t realise your family is weird until you meet other families or until an outsider comes into your circle and points it out to you.

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is a movie about family and how families are that weird bunch of people who you are stuck with and connected to no matter what.

Colin is the de facto head of the family as his father is weak, and Colin is loud. For New Year’s, he had rented out a country house in Dorset and invited the family (with some guests) to stay there and ring in the New Year. The spanner in the works comes when his sister tells him she has invited David, their brother who no one has seen for five years, and who left the family under a cloud.

Down Mansion

Director and writer Ben Wheatley’s first feature film, Down Terrace, trod similar ground to Happy New Year, Colin Burstead, and it does feel like Wheatley has gone back to his roots. Like Down Terrace, the action is mostly confirmed to a single location, the dialogue is semi-improvised, and handheld characters follow the action as though we’re watching a nature documentary about another species.

Unlike Down Terrace, this movie does not give us the catharsis of violence to ease the tension. The family strife in Down Terrace boils over into gangland killings, the family strife in Happy New Year, Colin Burstead stays on a rolling simmer for a long time before confrontations come to the forefront and take over proceedings. The message seems to the same with both movies though: family is inescapable until it isn’t. To say more than that would spoil both movies.

Family Feuds

What makes Happy New Year, Colin Burstead so compelling is the realness of its family. The Bursteads feel like a real family. They talk to each other with that level of ease and casual aggression that people who have spent most of their lives together often do, and they are not just a collection of tics and quirks.

It’s easy for movies about extended families to simply give each family member a quick odd trait and make that their personality. If you look at something like The Royal Tenenbaums, you see a collection of characters instead of people, and while I love that movie, I understand that it exists in a fantasy world.

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead, however, feels lived in and raw. Sometimes as a viewer, you become an eavesdropper and an uninvited guest to this drama that is playing out in seemingly every room of the mansion as old flames appear, black sheep arrive, and fathers beg sons for money.

Wheatley also manages to find that weird seam of family politics where allegiances change on the fly. A main crux of the film is the arrival of David, and once people begin to see his presence is poisonous, they each ask Colin to make him leave. Colin confronts David, gets angry, airs some dirty laundry, and then we begin to see the rest of the family turn on Colin for doing what they wanted him to do but not in the way they wanted him to do it.

Head of the Family

Anyone who is from a big family or, in my case, married into one, will recognise that strange pack mentality. No one wants to be a bad guy when it comes to their relatives, and when the drama does happen, it is important to know which side to be on. It’s like Game of Thrones, but the stakes are incredibly low, and rather than being sent to the Wall you might just find yourself not getting invited to a kid’s birthday party.

Neil Maskell manages to find a lot of meat in the Colin role. He is eternally exasperated by the family around him and yet he is the one that summoned them together. We never get a sense of if he’s doing it to show how much money he has or by obligation. Or simply because he loves these people and wants to have them all under one roof for new year’s. Every other character suspects different reasons, of course.

Doon Mackichan as Colin’s attention-seeking mother, Sandy is so familiar as a character that it is eerie. Everyone knows someone like Sandy Burstead, and the way Mackichan inhabits her is fantastic.

The other stand out would be Charles Dance, as Uncle Bertie. When we meet him, we assume that a certain aspect of his character will be a huge point of drama within the movie, but it becomes very clear that the family has dealt with it and moved on. Dance portrays Bertie with quiet, moving dignity. A man who lives for his family but doesn’t see them as often as he might like.

Conclusion: Happy New Year, Colin Burstead

Ben Wheatley continues to go from strength to strength, and it’s interesting to see him follow up the all guns blazing, star-studded Free Fire with something so small and reminiscent of his first work. With Happy New Year, Colin Burstead, he as crafted a very funny, very real family drama that shows a simple universal truth: all families are weird. Some are weirder/worse than others, but seeing the Bursteads up on the screen made me glad that they’re not my family.

Finally, this movie has possibly the best ending credits of any movie I’ve ever seen. I won’t spoil them but when I realised what was happening, it put a smile on my face that stuck with me long after I had left the cinema.