It Is in Us All (Campbell-Hughes, 2022)

It Is in Us All is a moody, oppressive film, brimming with angst and reticence. The story never quite coalesces into a coherent enough narrative to land hard, but it does provide Cosmo Jarvis with a welcome showcase for his considerable talent.

Jarvis plays Hamish, a Londoner whose past is shrouded in mystery. As the film opens, he is going to Donegal to claim an inheritance. His trip is delayed and extended by a horrific car accient that spurs a round of introspection and investigation. Did he see the other car? Why did he not swerve? Was he suicidal? Homicidal? In one of the film’s key scenes, Hamish rips the cast off his broken arm, an extended painful act that may signal penance or perhaps self-loathing.

Hamish meets Evan at the funeral of the car-crash victim, and they form an uneasy relationship. My read on it, influenced by some potential spoilers is that there is some homosexual attraction, but it is also possible to read Evan as some sort of mirror in which Hamish sees himself. It is a testament to the film’s weirdness, that I kept wondering if there was going to be a time-travel or Sixth Sense type of twist suggesting they were the same person. (Ironically, after I typed that, I read the Press Kit where director Antonia Campbell-Hughes refers to Hamish as one of the “walking dead,” so perhaps this interpretation was not such a reach after all.)

The film’s second big set piece is an argument between Evan and Hamish in a car, and while it does not provide Vertigo-like clarlity for what is motivating the characters, it does engender some sincere emphathy, which makes the movie valuable. Guilt, self-loathing, and insecurity were such familiar tropes in gay-themed films for so long that they are almost anathema now. But the car crash makes it less clear how much of Hamish’s guilt is misplaced and how much is just dispaced.

It Is in Us All won a Special Jury Award at the 2022 SXSW Film Festival and will be seeing a broader release at the end of May 2023.