Scan the local-affairs section of anglophone news outlets, and you’ll likely come across the acronym “NIMBY” or “nimbyism”, standing for “not in my back yard” and denoting opposition to real-estate developments and invasive land regulation from an area’s ordinary residents. Although this is far from a new set of traits, Kenneth McKay (Peter Mullan) could be cinema’s first true nimbyist, aiming to prevent his home of Arberloch in northern Scotland from forgetting his aristocratic ancestor Sir Douglas Weatherford and from being enwrapped in divisive culture-war issues unique to our age. The debut feature by Seán Dunn, The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford, which has garnered support from MUBI and BBC Film, is a black comedy with its eyes on the contemporary British zeitgeist, yet it feels underdeveloped in key storytelling factors, and its satire too insistently hits an easy target. It premiered last week in IFFR’s Big Screen Competition.

One of the most highly respected Scottish actors of his generation, and a Venice Golden Lion winner to boot for his 2002 directorial feature The Magdalene Sisters [+lire aussi :
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fiche film], Peter Mullan is a true asset in an above-the-title leading role, after usually being consigned to ensemble character work. He’s a world-class shouter and glowerer in his acting technique, so it’s novel and quite moving to see him as an aged widower in a tweedy cardigan, hanging on to some part-time work as a tour guide for heritage sites of the area’s only luminary, the aforementioned fictional 18th-century statesman and polymath. As he claims him as a distant relative (like many in the locale) and integrates voice-over (read by Jonathan Hyde) of Weatherford’s words delivered from beyond the grave, it’s not hard to realise, with his classical liberal values and questionable colonial past, that Weatherford is a candidate for a centuries-late “cancellation”, akin to the statue of Edward Colston famously chucked into the sea in Bristol, at the other end of the country to Arberloch.

A necessary challenge to this mindset arrives when a Game of Thrones knockoff show called The White Stag of Emberfell selects the town as its shooting location, and the small local economy quickly shelves Weatherford to embrace “Stag”-mania, with fanboys descending on landmarks for selfies and Kenneth forced to convert his commemorative tour into one themed to the show. The mid-2020s being a bit late to parody Game of Thrones, it’s a slightly arbitrary way for Dunn’s screenplay to force Kenneth into closing ranks; his attachment to Weatherford is revealed as a more unhealthy fixation, spiralling into mental delusion.

As said, Dunn’s primary achievement is in capturing the sclerotic grip that Britain’s heritage has on some of its older residents, and the fact that – akin to last year’s underrated US satire Eddington – social polarisation and technological change have allowed us to hold completely different perceptions of reality to one another. Yet the humour in Dunn’s premise is often neutralised by its need to provoke pathos for Kenneth, when he is arguably the story’s antagonist as well as its righteous hero, and the social commentary and showbiz satire are a few degrees shy of real specificity to convince.

The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford is a UK-US co-production, staged by Ossian International, Forensic Films and Come into the Fold. Its world sales are handled by Charades.