Two films showed up in competition at Cannes in 2008 which appeared to suggest new artistic directions being taken by two sets of the festival’s recent favourite filmmakers. The first was Le silence de Lorna (2008) by the frères Dardenne, which narratively seemed to take their usual naturalistic realist aesthetic and graft in onto an increasingly fairytale-like story. The second was Three Monkeys, the latest film from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose beautifully shot if languidly paced previous two films Uzak (2002) and İklimler (2006) had received significant critical acclaim and effectively established his position at the forefront of European cinema, alongside the brothers from Belgium.

Ceylan’s output may well be the very quintessence of many peoples’ idea of what constitutes an arthouse film: broadly existential themes, use of naturalistic acting, and a hugely idiosyncratic visual style. Where the work of the Dardennes frequently invites comparisons with that of Robert Bresson, Ceylan’s oeuvre unavoidably brings to mind references to the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky and Abbas Kiarostami: schools of filmmaking which glide at meditative paces, allowing the viewer to concentrate on how surrounding environments shape individuals’ assessments of their own identity. In short, his films are more than a little slower than Michael Bay’s.

Both Ceylan’s particular thematic concerns and filmmaking aesthetic can be considered to be present and correct in his new film: long unbroken takes, careful attention paid to faces and expressions, the breakdown of relationships and bonds of trust, the director’s painterly eye for capturing both urban geography and the force and beauty of the native Turkish weather. The difference though is in the type of story being told. Narratively, Uzak and İklimler, both focusing on slow disintegrations of familial relationships, could hardly be described as being stuffed with drama: Three Monkeys announces itself as different from the very off, beginning as it does with a most tragic event, a fatal car accident. Servet, a wealthy businessman running for office in upcoming elections, has run down and killed a pedestrian.

Sensing a premature end to his political ambitions, he rings up Eyüp, his usual driver, with a deal: take the blame for the accident and serve the brief prison time in exchange for a large cash sum for him and his poor family. Eyüp, wanting to do the best for his wife Hacer and son İsmail, agrees and duly enters into a short prison sentence. All is far from well back at home, however: İsmail has failed to get into college and appears to have fallen in with a bad crowd, much to the consternation of his mother who, desperate and lonely becomes ever closer to their rich, charismatic benefactor Servet.

Already a somewhat fractured family unit at the start of proceedings, the film slowly toys with the moral implications of Eyüp’s acceptance of Servet’s shady deal. The film’s title is an allusion to the proverbial three monkeys who see, hear and speak no evil respectively, and though it is never entirely a satisfactory allegory for the three family members here, the point is still a valid one: that they are all in some way in denial about what has been happening, unable either to forgive or even to accept the realities of their situation. On paper, this all sounds a little preachy and in the hands of a lesser filmmaker could have easily descended into moral soapboxing, but Ceylan keeps things ambiguously opaque enough not to suggest over-indulgence.

My enjoyment of the film was somewhat soured by my having read other reviews which explicitly made reference to the highly unusual and entirely unexpected supernatural elements which begin to filter into the story: needless to say I shall not do the same, but would comment that they were most intriguing to me; I am not entirely decided of what their presence was for, but certainly feel they add something – hinting at some hidden grief at loss which may explain other matters on further watches perhaps? As with Ceylan’s previous work, the ending seems to reinforce the director’s strongly pessimistic view of human nature, but where Uzak and İklimler were sombre reflections rooted in melancholy, Three Monkeys feels like something entirely new from him, a straight-faced parable of the dangers of moral corruption which weighs uneasily on the mind.

British film-maker Duane Hopkins arrives on the feature-length scene having being touted by some as “the new Lynne Ramsay”, something of a lazy label routinely applied to any young British director working in the confines of social realism. Set in Hopkins’ native Cotswolds, though this really could be anywhere in rural England, Better Things focuses on the lives of a small set of mostly unconnected individuals: a young heroin user whose girlfriend has just died of an overdose, a pair of recently split teenagers, a reunited elderly couple readjusting to life together, and a young housebound agoraphobe whose elderly grandmother has been moved in to her family’s home.

Hard drug use is prevalent amongst the younger characters, but although it can hardly be said to be romanticized here, it is presented as another escape from drab everyday realities, as much as fast drives down country lanes late at night, playing video games or fumbled, inexperienced sexual encounters. Boredom, the inability to articulate truth and emotions to close friends and partners, and the frustrations of living in a dead-end town all conspire to present drug-use not as a glamorous lifestyle choice nor a squalid retreat but merely a choice that has been made by desperate individuals. The use of a largely non-professional cast, drawn from the region and many of whom having experienced drug problems in the past, gives a feeling that the filmmaker is not being judgemental or condescending towards them or their characters.

The middle-aged are notable by their absence in this setting, and the film largely successfully illustrates the commonality between the feeling of isolation and of being trapped between old and young: the old confined by physical frailty and resistance to change, the young by geography, fear or their own poor economic prospects. Hopkins has a background in short-film making, and early on the apparent disconnectedness of the characters and their seeming lack of development do make the parallel stories feel somewhat like separate projects sandwiched together; as the film wears on, however, there is a noticeable convergence, most obviously in one scene in a park where two of the characters’ stories are beautifully juxtaposed, underlining the central thesis of common isolation across the age gap. There are no easy escapes and answers to these situations, but their possibility is more than hinted at by the close.

I always notice that when travelling through parts of rural England that the dominant, most noticeable objects protruding from the flat landscapes are the spires of the country churches, whose function I imagine in these settings to be closer to what they were many years ago in comparison to the modern role of their urban counterparts. Better Things begins with a funeral service and returns near the end of the story to the same place, yet organized religion and spirituality in general are otherwise in absence from the lives of these characters; given the theme of mortality running throughout the film, and the constant searching for something ‘other’, whether through drugs or physical love, there is clearly the invitation to ponder the implications of the absence of a god from these people’s lives.

Hopkins, with a background in photography, has a superb eye for composition, and it is noticeable that most of the film is shot with a completely static camera, pacing established through carefully controlled editing. Shooting in anamorphic widescreen could easily render a romanticized Constable-like picture of beautiful windswept English landscapes, but there is little of that here; instead, a picture of overcast gloom pervades, the landscape forbidding and chilly, and against which characters are left to roam in their own small isolations. It is this external world that the young agoraphobic Gail appears to be unable to enter, yet the same one that her frail housebound Nan wants to experience once again: perhaps since house interiors are lit in cold blues, painting them as imposing, claustrophobic places, devoid of homely warmth.

Again on a technical note, there is a very effective use of sound design to communicate some of the film’s thematic concerns; music is used sparingly and is entirely diegetic, punctuating the otherwise prevalent silences and sounds of nature only intermittently, showing its use by both young and old as a temporary, unsatisfactory release from everyday boredoms. And during one of their late night burns through the countryside, the unusually candid nature of a conversation between two characters is highlighted when the deafening roar of the car engine is artificially muted on the soundtrack, one of several occasions when sound is manipulated to heighten dramatic effect.

Better Things is a very hard watch thanks both to its unremitting emotionally downbeat tone and its graphic scenes of drug-taking, which will be enough to make it off-limits to all but disciples of the Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh strand of bleakness. But while not likely to cheer or amuse, the film is invested with such genuine humanism and provides a most delicate, faint sense of hope for its characters that despite its melancholy air I found myself strangely uplifted by it. A very promising debut from a thoughtful, inventive filmmaker.