Edinburgh 2010: Third Star

Third Star seemed an odd choice for closing night simply because it's so melancholy; if The Illusionist started proceedings on a bittersweet note, Hattie Dalton's film could easily have sent everyone home on a wrist-slitting downer. Over the 11 days of the festival, EIFF audiences had already seen some pretty brutal things. Karl Golden's Pelican Blood dealt with self-harm and suicide; Nick Moran's The Kid showed scenes of harrowing domestic abuse, and Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, despite being an effective thriller, offered a sobering view of rural poverty in America. Even the EIFF's one out-and-out comedy, Ben Miller's Huge (which I haven't seen, but it divided people), traumatised at least one critic, who confided to me via text that it just might be “the Citizen Kane of unfunniness”. However, audiences responded surprisingly warmly to the Third Star's themes of friendship and loyalty, getting that it's ultimately a film about fighting back, not doom and gloom.

It takes a while for the film to settle down, and, having gone in cold, I had no idea what to expect. In a nutshell, James (Benedict Cumberbatch, pictured) a young, middle-class guy in his 30s, is dying of cancer, so he asks his three best friends – Davy (Tom Burke), Miles (JJ Feild) and Bill (Adam Robertson) – to take him for one last visit to Barafundle Bay, a remote beach in Wales that holds fond memories for him. The journey is picaresque, and for a while the film suggests it might make at least two radical departures, first when the friends encounter some sort of costumed folk celebration and again when they meet an obsessive scavenger (Hugh Bonneville) who is trawling the shoreline for, of all things, rare Star Wars figurines from a wrecked cargo boat.

I'll admit right now that I had problems with the set-up, simply because Davy, Miles and Bill don't seem to be the kind of guys you could trust to take a dying man to the pub, let alone a place so seemingly inaccessible as Barafundle Bay. Their characters, too, were hard to warm to: Bill is in TV, Davy in PR (or was, he's redundant) and I don't think we ever really find out what Miles does, except that everyone thinks he's far richer than he actually is. Miles, in particular, sports an unforgivable jumper towards the end that, I'm ashamed to say, totally distracted me from the story!

However, Cumberbatch, last seen playing a hostage negotiator in Four Lions, does incredibly well with a difficult role. Ironically enough, I think he's the one character who's supposed to test our sympathy, being spiky, difficult and provocative, berating his mates for their lack of ambition and their willingness to settle for second best. But James finally emerges as this so-far-meandering film's guiding light, revealing his real reasons for the trip and putting the trio's friendship to the test. Here, the film snaps into focus, but, despite my best efforts, I couldn't quite buy into the ensuing drama: I was moved more by the friends' very real dilemma than the emotion created on the screen, which I think perhaps had more to do with the chemistry of the casting than Vaughan Sivell’s poignant script.

Still, Third Star does try to be different, and its message – that it's better to go with a struggle than a shrug – was perhaps the festival's reason for showing it on closing night, offering a subtle challenge rather than a solid crowdpleaser. The EIFF has had criticism this year, the worst of it from The Guardian, but although the programme was certainly a lot more low-key than previous years, there was plenty there if you looked. The festival's keyword this year was “discovery”, but I think the lesson here is that some people, certainly the media, don't want to discover, they prefer being told. And if nothing else, Third Star is a welcome shot against the bows of such complacency.