Determined to be more multi-hyphenated, singer-actress Billie Piper now adds director-writer to her lift of skills with her debut Rare Beasts. The former Doctor Who star’s debut concerns the life of a single mother living her son in the midst of a relationship with an odd co-worker. It strives to make sense of the messy connections we all have in our lives, but unfortunately, it all proves to be more of a mess itself along the way.
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Billie plays Mandy. She thinks she’s falling in love with co-worker Pete (Leo Bill), so is happy to run through the motions of the relationship even as the idiosyncratic behaviours of themselves and of their respective families come to bear, as well as their own views on what roles men and women should play
The world of Rare Beasts, to put it lightly, is an odd one. This is a world in which the dialogue is highly stylised, so no one ever particularly speaks in a pattern resembling normal behaviour. This is matched by a script that flows through time and events with a very loose approach, as events begin to roll into one another, and Mandy’s anxieties and thoughts become more and more surreally delivered.
It demonstrates a certain audaciousness to Piper on her debut, looking to craft something that feels so distinctly stylised. Her devotion to her voice I certainly spirited and there is the sense that every idea is being thrown out on the screen. She makes great use of the city of London and her suburbs, but sadly, all of the characters end up feeling too far away from us to connect, with Pete particularly never proving to be worthy of so much attention.
This lack of an anchor into the more human drama of complicated relationships (both familial and romantic) that does lie at the heart of Piper’s film is what ends up making it completely drift away. The film convinces itself to get more abstract and nonsensical in its dialogue and narrative as it carries on. As a result, much of that initial sense of spirit ends up feeling more like indulgence, an indulgence that ultimately proves to be more alienating to a viewer than anything else.
It does feel harsh to be criticising the work of a first time director for throwing too much into their first feature approach (and particularly when its someone I’ve been a fan of for a long time), but the film is so full on and nonsensical from the off that it proves very hard to get a holding on any of the drama unfolding. There’s certainly promise in being able to forge as unique voice as there clearly is in the film, it just seems to run away from itself in the moment. As a result, the film feels confused and unclear in what it is that it’s trying to articulate. There’s also no denying that a lot of the composition, blocking and approach to performance seem much better suited for the stage rather than the screen.
Piper should more than be commended for managing to establish such a unique sense of voice in her debut, but in its current form, that voice can seem a little nonsensical, indulgent and meandering. There’s promise here, but it needs some fine tuning in order to give this beast enough of a bite to leave a mark on an audience that is unfortunately left largely adrift this time around.
Rare Beasts is awaiting a release date.
