My Summer of Love (2005)

Pop culture is now so drenched in glib ''dark'' thrills that it's rare, and purifying, to encounter a movie with a true feel for the sinister. In My Summer of Love, a startling coming-of-age drama set in a luminous green valley of the Yorkshire moors, Mona (Natalie Press), freckled and strawberry blond, with a slightly coarse adolescent sexiness that lights up whenever she thinks she's formed a connection to someone, is drawn into the orbit of Tamsin (Emily Blunt), who is posh and gorgeous, and damaged in ways we can't quite make out.

On paper, they're opposites. Mona, hiding beneath her hair (think Sissy Spacek's Carrie meets Peppermint Patty), drifts through the days, randy and vaguely depressed — often the same thing for a teenager. She's having sex with a local bloke who's too old for her, and she lives in a garret just over the pub run by her brother, Phil (Paddy Considine), a violent ex-con who has tried to escape his past by becoming an evangelical Christian. Tamsin, meanwhile, is spending the summer in her family's ivy-covered mansion. She's a creature of designer dresses and perfectly bred cheekbones, and even her tale of despair — her sister died of anorexia — carries a twinge of upper-crust chic.

As the two become friends, then lovers (the fact that both are female is treated as a casual nonissue), the writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski follows their relationship with a sophisticated grasp of the delights, secrets, and shared woes that can bring teenage girls together. Tamsin's cruelty is the wild card here (in a jolting scene, she uses her sexual power to burn through Phil's Jesus-freak pieties), and the affair grows ominous and gothic under the lazy British sun. An austerely heightened tale of sensual anxiety, My Summer of Love is shot in a gorgeous, saturated handheld style that recalls the Danish Dogmatists but also carries premonitions of perversity and dread that reach back to such Roman Polanski films as Knife in the Water and Cul-de-Sac. Pawlikowski has made a romance that becomes a horror movie in which love, more than anything around it, is a delusionary fever to fear. Blunt and Press, each making her debut, create an ambiguous bond charged with rapturous suspicion. A prediction: My Summer of Love will be the first of many acts for these two.

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