Adult Life Skills

Year: 2016

Actors: Brett Goldstein, Jodie Whittaker, Harvey Scrimshaw, Edward Hogg

Duration: 96 min

Anna is stuck: she's approaching 30, living like a hermit in her mum's garden shed (nicknamed Shed Zeppelin or Right Shed Fred, depending on which one of the signs the viewer believes) and wondering why the suffragettes ever bothered.She spends her days making videos using her thumbs as actors. Thumbs that bicker about things like whether Yogi Bear is a moral or existential nihilist. Bad how-to guides, space travel stories, and a detective show where she and twin brother Billy actually look alike (they both have the same bad hair and a mustache). But Anna does not show these videos to anyone and no one knows what they are for.Anna is unmotivated and after Billy's death, depressed. She gets up and goes to work each day, although it is not clear just what it is that she does. There is a list of jobs on a whiteboard. An envelope shows her address as a town in Yorkshire, England, and the viewer can likely assume based on Anna's history that the address is current.Anna is pretty, if she would just try. She has a platonic friend Brendan who as the local estate agent is helping her find a place to live, as well as spending time with her on fun activities. Brendan denies being gay but others suspect he is; his awkward interpersonal skills continually undermine his attempts to seduce her.A week before her birthday her Mum serves her an ultimatum she needs to move out of the shed, get a haircut that does not put her gender in question and stop dressing like a homeless teenager. Naturally, Anna tells her Mum to BACK THE F-OFF. For one thing, her mum also lives with her own mum.However, when her school friend Fiona comes to visit, Anna's self-imposed isolation becomes impossible to maintain. Soon she is entangled with a troubled eight year old boy named Clint obsessed with Westerns. Clint wears a cowboy hat and says he is named for Eastwood. He seems to want to be a cowboy, and he's a little on the naughty side, rarely smiling but mostly accepting of his situation, though he wants his mum. Clint's mum is seriously ill and has to be taken to hospital. His dad does demolition work and is gone a lot, so Anna and her family end up taking care of him. Mostly Anna. She needs to learn responsibility.This is a story about confronting the things we are most scared of a story that explores the universal themes of being lost and finding yourself, making peace with who you are, and regaining self-confidence and dignity.

Genre: Action   Comedy   Drama