Vague Visages’ Silver Haze review contains minor spoilers. Sacha Polak’s 2023 movie features Vicky Knight, Esme Creed-Miles and Charlotte Knight. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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For decades, the British working-class indie movie has been a heteronormative playing field. When they come around, they’re viscerally exciting — from 1997’s misogynistic Nil by Mouth to the plethora of up-and-comers the last year has provided, such as Luna Carmoon’s Hoard and Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper. In Sacha Polak’s second English-language feature Silver Haze, this typical cinematic blueprint is flipped on its head, weaving sexual exploration into a rich (albeit dire) tapestry of council houses and decrepit coastal towns.

What instantly sets Silver Haze apart from its predecessors is its grasp on reality. Most of these films have been heavily inspired by a portion of real life — just look at Carmoon’s personal influence in Hoard — but they are typically fictionalized. In Silver Haze, the boundaries are much less defined. The storyline follows Franky, a young woman grappling with a fraught personal life while questioning her sexuality, with actress Vicky Knight heavily leaning into her experiences as a burn victim and health practitioner. The result is a deliciously naturalistic performance, as the lead essentially plays herself through peaks and pits, reliving details down to the cause of her burns and the resulting aftermath. It’s a brave and selfless strategy, and one that ultimately pays off. 

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Shrewdly written while toeing the line between hardened and romanticized visuals, Silver Haze should be applauded for its uniquely vulnerable take on intimacy. Sex is a tool used frequently in cinema, always driving forward the narrative by letting the audience into a character’s most primal instincts. Through Silver Haze’s barely-clothed scenes, Polak underlines the difference between desire and intent, with the truth spilling out — not just through post-sex deep and meaningfuls, but in every thrust, grunt and climax. Interesting, it’s the sapphic sex that is the most undesirable, refreshingly moving away from the stereotype that to be feminine is to be delicate.

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The magnum opus of Silver Haze, therefore, is Franky and love interest Florence’s (Esmé Creed-Miles) relationship itself. Perhaps one would expect nothing less from the daughter of emotional titan Samantha Morton, but the pair’s fluctuating lack of apathy is astounding. Building a connection full of miscommunication and fleeting focus, Franky and Florence’s intense and quickly established romance proves that to love another woman is often a challenge and a chore. Gone is the electric charm of Bound (1996), the ever-present hope of But I’m A Cheerleader! (1999) and the whimsy of Carol (2015).

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After working like a dog to establish something so piercing and abundantly unseen, Silver Haze pivots during the third act. In a classic case of losing steam before the end of the race, Franky treads too much water as she splits her energy between a dangerous home life, an unrewarding relationship and new connections that immediately require a lot of what she has to give. When the protagonist needs to give up the ghost and move on, she doesn’t, prompting viewers to examine her murky day-to-day experiences.

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Queerness that isn’t defined by its queerness is always a green flag, but what makes Silver Haze an enriching addition to the lesbian canon of cinema is its rugged ties to the British working class. Thanks to Polak’s guidance — and her well-worn relationship with Vicky Knight — the film never shies away from the volatility of existing as LGBTQIA+ in a society that is clearly bound by a rigid class system, yet it never lets that premise run away with itself.

Jasmine Valentine (@thejasvalentine) is the editor-in-chief of FILMHOUNDS Magazine and a TV/Movies writer at Dexerto. She has previously written for Total Film, Little White Lies and The Daily Beast.

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