Well this is 2021 in a nutshell. Nothing more than a series of locked shots from various windows in London accompanying soundbites of speeches from Boris Johnson. If that sounds like a hard sell, well... it is. It’s pretty obvious that like me, filmmaker John Smith isn’t a Boris fan. Even at just 16 minutes, this drags a bit though. For a large section the only change in the frame is the time of day, the weather, the odd flock of birds. Mercifully there is a little variation half way through when we get a nighttime tour through some neighbouring windows. It’s very voyeuristic and doesn’t really appear to have much purpose. Boris isn’t ever present, there are sequences of foley sound, planes, helicopters, motorbikes, dogs barking, wind and construction noises. Boris is the backbone though and although the edit of his various covid focused speeches is okay, I found myself crying out for something more substantial. The Skewer do this sort of sound design amazingly and show this up to be a bit lacking. It does get better as we reach the end, becoming a little more playful with the edit, but on the whole I’m not sure this is all that successful.
3/10
