{"id":117486,"date":"2025-08-29T02:50:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T02:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/117486\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T02:50:06","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T02:50:06","slug":"the-big-heat-what-sunburn-cinema-tells-us-about-the-great-british-holiday-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/117486\/","title":{"rendered":"The big heat: what \u2018sunburn cinema\u2019 tells us about the Great British holiday | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

As we near the end of a hot, dry August, I\u2019m longing for a Mediterranean getaway; salt-crisp skin, a Fanta lemon, and a tinge of pink across my shoulders. I\u2019m also thinking about what I like to call \u201csunburn cinema\u201d \u2013 homegrown films like recent release Hot Milk (adapted from Deborah Levy<\/a>\u2019s novel), which remind us we\u2019re a nation uniquely ill-equipped to deal with the sun. Or, as one popular Letterboxd review<\/a> puts it: \u201cOh no, the Brits are on trauma vacation again\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sunburn is the hallmark of a particular kind of Brit abroad, visual evidence of the lack of decorum that we notoriously display across the resorts and beach towns of Europe. Sunburn cinema, however, pinpoints what makes us inclined to chaos and self-sabotage.<\/p>\n

Hot Milk<\/a>, for example, sees mother and daughter Rose (Fiona Shaw) and Sofia (Emma Mackey) seek answers for Rose\u2019s undiagnosed pain at a mysterious Spanish clinic, making a sad holiday out of a desperate last ditch effort to improve their lives. Things quickly go off the rails, and Sofia kicks out by indulging in all the idiosyncrasies of the British way of holidaying: boozing, broiling, and sleeping around. Ultimately both mother and daughter\u2019s hopes curdle in the heat, leaving the viewer feeling as burned and foolish as its protagonists.<\/p>\n

Curdling \u2026 Emma Mackey, left, and Fiona Shaw in Hot Milk. Photograph: Nikos Nikolopoulos\/Nikos Nikolopoulos\/Mubi<\/p>\n

A sour turn is a hallmark of these films, which are concerned not just with the holiday itself but with the overarching tumult of trying to escape ourselves. It\u2019s a broad genre, with a long tradition of bawdy comedy. Tongue-in-cheek films such as Carry on Abroad paved the way for gross-out farces such as Kevin and Perry Go Large<\/a> or The Inbetweeners Movie<\/a> (a film about, primarily \u201ctwo weeks of sun, sea, sex, sand, booze [and] sex\u201d). These films cavort through a series of mishaps with alcohol, light xenophobia, injury, sexual conquests and disasters, all while poking fun at themselves. Smacked pink by the ravages of UV, their holidaymakers wear sunburn as a badge of honour, happy by the time the credits roll to return to their own lives after all.<\/p>\n

Brits are a moody lot though, and the darker end of the spectrum is fertile ground. The dawn of the millennium saw the boom of bargain travel with the rise of easyJet and Ryanair, and gave us two tent poles of the genre: Sexy Beast<\/a> and Morvern Callar<\/a>. Who could forget the sight of neon pink Ray Winstone as Gal in Sexy Beast, the typical Costa Del Sol transplant, blustering: \u201cOh, it\u2019s fucking hot. Too hot? Not for me, I love it\u201d? We soon see Gal in hot water though, as his dream of leaving a life of crime behind is torched by the arrival of Ben Kingsley\u2019s unhinged mobster Don. Dragging Gal back to the \u201cgrimy, sooty\u201d dump that is England, Don is a violent reminder that you can\u2019t leave who you are behind.<\/p>\n

Spiralling off the rails \u2026 Kathleen McDermott and Samantha Morton in Morvern Callar. Photograph: Company Pictures\/Sportsphoto\/Allstar<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Lynne Ramsay\u2019s Morvern Callar takes the idea of escaping reality to extremes. After finding his dead body, Morvern (Samantha Morton) passes off her boyfriend\u2019s book as her own, and absconds to Spain to spend the money he left her for the funeral. Morvern brings her friend Lanna along for the ride, and the pair make free and merry with the booze at first, shacking up in a cheap and cheerful resort where the pre-eurozone pound goes far. But after a strange sexual encounter with another grieving holidaymaker, Morvern starts to spiral, sending the whole endeavour off the rails.<\/p>\n

These films don\u2019t inhabit the romanticised landscape of #eurosummer that Americans fantasise about. Instead they present a flat strip, plastic-filled beaches, cheap drinks and decaying hotels. Morvern Callar is a feverish, atmospheric film that reflects the confusion and dissociation of grief, and Ramsay washes Spain out in an unfocused blur of constant sun. Similarly, director Jonathan Glazer aims a dazzling light at Gal in Sexy Beast, using top-down shots to suggest a bug trapped in the glare of a microscope.<\/p>\n

After the boom and bust of the package holiday dream, post-Brexit malaise suffuses a recent wave of films with a similar bleakness. Charlotte Wells\u2019 striking debut Aftersun<\/a> is an exploration of the way grief distorts the past as it journeys to a Turkish resort, as Calum (Paul Mescal) tries to keep his demons at bay while holidaying with his young daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio). Wells uses a similarly stark lighting style to Ramsay, intensifying blue tones to contrast an oppressively bright sun, and Sophie\u2019s slow awakening to her father\u2019s fragile state of mind plays out like one long gut-punch.<\/p>\n

A bug trapped in the glare of a microscope \u2026 Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Molly Manning Walker<\/a>\u2019s biting How to Have Sex<\/a> takes a closer look at the kind of holiday The Inbetweeners lads dream of. Walker dramatises the way these rites-of-passage trips are built on a culture that is ripe for exploitation, leaving young thrill-seekers vulnerable to party reps, to price-gouging clubs, and to each other. As its teens navigate their own confused expectations around booze and sex, it\u2019s hard not to squirm with recognition at a particularly British kind of peer pressure that pushes boundaries and muddies consent.<\/p>\n

Sunburn cinema consists of sweaty, sticky films shot through with a deep anxiety about identity and place. As the hangover kicks in, so does the realisation that a holiday is only ever a stopover, never a destination. As Lanna snipes to Morvern: \u201cIt\u2019s the same crapness everywhere, so stop dreaming\u201d; this dour outlook shapes these films\u2019 sensibility. The British can\u2019t lay claim to the glamorous dog-days ennui of our continental cinema counterparts, instead we\u2019re either slathering on the factor 50 or exposing ourselves to the consequences. Confronted with a cloudless sky and an endless sea, we tend to lose our heads, and are left with the sting of our poor decisions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As we near the end of a hot, dry August, I\u2019m longing for a Mediterranean getaway; salt-crisp skin,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117487,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-117486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117486\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}