In a sentenceWe stopped watching the actors’ mouths and started dreading what the voices might say
Clio Barnard approaches Andrea Dunbar through recorded accounts from her family and friends, performed on screen by actors who lip-sync the speakers’ voices. Lorraine Dunbar (Manjinder Virk) and Lisa Thompson (Christine Bottomley) offer contrasting responses to family life, while Ann Hamilton (Monica Dolan) adds another voice. Archive footage of Dunbar sits beside these staged encounters and the estate surroundings. As the family members describe their experiences, their different responses make a single account difficult to settle on. The film follows those disagreements, asking what can be understood about Dunbar through the people whose lives are bound up with hers.
The Arbor makes a difficult family history gripping through recorded voices and lip-synched performances. Clio Barnard’s staging sometimes distracts from the testimony, but we warmly recommend the film for the attention it gives to conflicting memories.
The Arbor is a demanding, moving film whose unusual method mostly earns the attention it asks for. Clio Barnard uses actors to lip-sync recorded testimony about Andrea Dunbar and her family, placing those performances alongside archive footage and estate settings. The obvious risk is that we spend the evening checking mouths against voices. For much of the film, the people speaking give us too much to think about for that to remain our chief concern.
Lorraine Dunbar, played by Manjinder Virk, is central to that achievement. The performance has to accommodate another person’s speech, and its strength lies in making us listen without pretending that the actor and the speaker are interchangeable. Lisa Thompson, played by Christine Bottomley, gives the family portrait a different emotional emphasis and complicates our response to what we hear. We found the daughters’ contrasting responses painful: their feelings about the same family are so far apart that hearing both brings little reassurance.
Monica Dolan, playing Ann Hamilton, is another reason the method holds. Her performance keeps our attention on the account being given, even while we remain aware of the work involved in matching someone else’s speech. The archive footage of Andrea Dunbar is particularly valuable because it interrupts our scrutiny of the actors and lets us attend to her. Those passages also expose a difficulty elsewhere: we can become so interested in how the testimony is delivered that we stop hearing it.
Ole Birkeland’s cinematography and Matthew Button’s production design make the estate surroundings and staged encounters feel like parts of the same film. That consistency matters when archive material is also competing for our attention. Yet some of the composed images ask us to admire the presentation at precisely the moment we want to concentrate on a voice. We occasionally caught ourselves studying an actor’s mouth for accuracy, and the film had to win our attention back.
Daniel Goddard and Nick Fenton’s editing makes the movement between archive material and performance comprehensible without resolving the differences between the family accounts. We can follow the film while remaining unsure how to reconcile what people tell us. Molly Nyman and Harry Escott’s music helps sustain the unease, though the recorded voices do most of the emotional work. At 91 minutes, the film is not overlong, but its concentration on Lorraine sometimes becomes wearing, with too little change in pressure from one passage to the next.
That difficulty is worth sitting with. We tend to trust documentary testimony more readily when we can look directly at the person giving it, and Clio Barnard makes that habit worth questioning. A straightforward interview would still leave us deciding which account to believe. The film allows conflicting responses to remain uncomfortable, and the actors cannot supply an agreement that the recorded speakers have withheld.
We recommend it with a warning about the sustained distress, not a reassurance that the technique makes it easier. There is little here for an evening when we need a film to put things right. Choose it when there is time afterwards to talk about what each of us heard.
Most critics respond warmly to The Arbor, with praise centred on its blend of recorded testimony and staged performance. Actors lip-syncing real voices make memories vivid and unsettling for many reviewers, who find the approach emotionally powerful as well as formally inventive. The performances draw particular praise: The AV Club singles out Manjinder Virk as Lorraine, while several reviews stress the compassion beneath the film’s difficult portrait of the Dunbar family.
Reservations concern whether those same techniques clarify the testimony or distract from it. Total Film finds the story powerful but muddled, with the lip-syncing an obstacle; Slant Magazine argues that the art-film framing sometimes competes with the documentary audio. Paste admires the method but finds that the shift towards Dunbar’s daughter weakens the focus. The spread runs from enthusiasm to qualified appreciation, with no outright negative verdict among the reviews counted.
The review describes the film as fascinating and slippery. It praises the storytelling trickery that makes its experimental approach engaging.
Read the full review →Kohn praises the film’s inventive approach to documentary storytelling, while finding its cumulative effect deeply claustrophobic. He singles out the lip-syncing actors and immersive staging as ways the film makes its subjects’ memories vivid and unsettling.
Read the full review →Tobias praises the film’s ingenious docu-fiction approach while finding its portrait of the Dunbar family haunting and difficult to watch. He singles out Manjinder Virk’s mesmerizing performance as Lorraine.
Read the full review →Scheib finds the film formally inventive, socially revelatory, and dramatically spellbinding. He especially praises how its verbatim-theater technique layers authentic voices with artificial imagery.
Read the full review →Smith finds the film a moving, bold and accessible tribute to Andrea Dunbar. She particularly praises its daring use of actors lip-syncing to recordings of Dunbar’s loved ones, combined with archive footage and estate settings.
Read the full review →Bradshaw finds the film a brilliant, compassionate tribute to Andrea Dunbar and her community. He especially praises Barnard’s eerie blend of documentary interviews and staged performance.
Read the full review →
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