Shoulders is an existentialist film using the modern battlefield as a petri dish for Jamie Flatters' experiments into humanity.

It's about the life of young men in 2024 feeling like a war with an invisible, possibly non-existent enemy and the various ways they can come to terms with that (or fail to). It deals with paranoia, insanity, ladhood, hierarchy, leadership, communication, time, forgiveness, guilt and the eternal delights of goob.

The film opens with a unit of soldiers, without weapons, abandoned by their older commander, who is present in the film only as a disembodied voice with unhelpful advice and impossible commands. We follow this unit as they attempt to reckon with this situation.

Each one of this group of leaderless men takes centre stage at different times to explore their particular method of reckoning with the situation. This can include mimicking the older generation, escaping into drugs or attempting a metaphysical transcendence.

As the film unfolds, it encloses the audience in more complex questions about the nature of reality and what truly causes events to take shape the way they do.

Shoulders, as premiered at CIFF, was a triumph. The culmination of a heroic effort, it was a Clapham native's homecoming show, after setting out into the wilderness with his band of brothers and sisters to see what they could bring back for the rest of us to enjoy. Producing a full length film of this quality for no money is a miraculous act, like turning water into wine.

During the panel after the screening, the faces of the actors and production team when they were around Flatters made it clear that they would follow him into hell if he asked them to. Which he basically had, by taking them to the Scottish Highlands for twelve days, working sixteen hours a day and sometimes running out of food, all on a voluntary basis.

Flatters explained the primary motivation behind the film was that he had ‘an amazing group of people and wanted to try to get something made with them’. If we take the role of the director as the mediator between the resources available and the eventual audience then I can't see how he could have done more with what he had.

You could say that it's not really fair to assess Shoulders in the same way as a film with more than a thousand times the budget. But I think that it's an expression of the film's quality that it CAN be put in universal comparison. So let's leave to one side the context Shoulders emerged from and subject it to some harsh critical analysis.

The more technical aspects of film-making are where Shoulders excels.

Visually, the film looks great. The cinematography, the production design and the locations combine to create an immersive set of images that are a joy to look at. The snow suits and goob apparatus were especially great choices.

The cinematography in particular is better than the average big-budget commercial film. The amount of playful shots and interesting perspectives while retaining the clarity of action was very impressive.

The music and sound design were good too. There were clear cues as to what was happening, without overpowering the rest of the film.

The basic ideas of the film are great and well worth exploring. Starting from a group of boy soldiers without weapons saying ‘bang’, up to psychological melt-downs and distortions of the space-time continuum. The symbolism of radio and telephone generates some arresting lines. The war drug ‘goob’ (that is explicitly not cannabis) particularly works well and feels like it draws from real experience. Flatters has set himself an ambitious goal in tackling all the questions of modern life, as well as causation and reality.

However, along with the effective elements of the film, there are some clunky scenes, some confusing parts, some disjointed stuff and a lot of repetition. The confusion, disjointedness and repetition felt partially (but only partially) intentional. There is a solid core here of ideas and a way to express them, but what's needed is a better balance of the deliberate disorientation and alienation with a sense of urgency and connection.

It seems to me that the desired effect is an existential universality which is achieved for just about the majority of the film. Sometimes the universality veers into vagueness, and during these moments I found it difficult to care about what was happening.

The time and place of the film and the origins of the characters are drawn with very few specific details, creating a deliberately contextless, almost abstract world in which the film takes place. Sometimes this generates a feeling of universal brotherhood in despair, and sometimes we're witness to arguments between strangers that I'd find it hard to describe if pressed.

The characters are a collection of everymen, which some of the actors use to great effect. On the other hand, without a realistic grounding, it leaves a few of the performances one-dimensional at times. It was definitely a good idea to have the character's names written on their costumes because I wouldn't have been able to keep track of all of them otherwise. I did end up wondering how much of this interchangeability is an intentional example of male expendability and how much of it is a failure to differentiate their voices and actions from each other.

Towards the end, the talking and voice over started to feel portentous and I found myself trying to create waypoints for myself like ‘okay now we're in Act 3’ because I couldn't really tell where we were in the arc of this story.

The film has an ending but not really a resolution. It leaves open a lot of questions, which makes sense, because if they had discovered the secret to life in the 2020s I would hope they could have shared it a bit earlier.

I was left very pleased to have seen this film. It provided a lot of food for thought, and as I said above, is a marvellous achievement for everyone involved.

In short, Shoulders is a glorious goob trip promising pleasure and excitement while sneaking in a paranoid suspicion that the film is trying to turn you into its unseen enemy.

Success on its own terms: Absolutely. ★★★★★

Success in terms of every possible film: Yeah, kind of. ★★★