Low Tide at Fleetwood review – a Lancashire fishing town drama of rare patience and grace

Four stars. Low Tide at Fleetwood opens with a woman cleaning a boat that will never go to sea again. Carol (Lesley Strang, in a performance that should put her on every awards list this winter) scrubs the deck of her late husband’s trawler for 11 unbroken minutes, and the camera does not cut away once, and by the end of it you know almost everything about her that the next 90 minutes will confirm: she is 58, she is exhausted, she is furious, and she is not going to stop.

Carys Morgan’s debut feature, which premiered on Saturday at the London film festival, is set over a single winter in the Lancashire port where the writer-director grew up. Fleetwood once had the third largest fishing fleet in England; it now has a handful of inshore boats, a shuttered market and a heritage trail. Morgan has no interest in nostalgia for any of this. Her film is about what it means to go on living in a place after the reason for the place has gone.

Carol’s husband Dave has died of a heart attack six weeks before the film begins, leaving her a boat worth less than its mooring fees, a son in Preston who rings on Sundays and a daughter-in-law (Nadia Khoury, excellent) who keeps turning up with casseroles Carol does not want. The plot, such as it is, concerns whether Carol will sell the boat. The film, which is a different thing, concerns whether she will let anyone help her.

Morgan shoots in long, patient takes, mostly in the hour before dusk when the light off Morecambe Bay turns the mudflats a bruised silver. Her cinematographer, Jude Oyelaran, finds extraordinary compositions in the ordinary: a bus shelter against a container crane, a pensioner’s rollator on a slipway, Carol’s face lit only by the glow of a chip shop sign. There is almost no score. When music does arrive, in a scene set at a working men’s club karaoke night that is the film’s unexpected emotional centre, it lands like a wave.

Strang, a stage actor making her first screen lead at 61, is simply magnificent. She gives Carol a bitter, barbed humour that keeps the film from ever tipping into misery, and a physical weariness that she never lets become performance. A scene in which she tries and fails to lift a lobster pot by herself, then sits on it and lights a cigarette, is as complete a portrait of grief as I have seen on screen.

The film is not without weaknesses. A subplot about a property developer eyeing the dock is underwritten, and a final shot that gestures toward hope feels a half-degree too neat for everything that has preceded it. But Morgan has made something rare: a working-class British drama that is neither grim nor sentimental, that trusts its audience to sit still, and that finds in a dying town not a tragedy but a woman.

Low Tide at Fleetwood screened at the London film festival; it is released in UK cinemas on 13 November.