In this critic’s view, coming-of-age films are particularly powerful in eliciting the difficult emotion of reflection – in regard to the environment, but also to the choices we inhabit as children that shape us into adults. 7 Miles Out is one such example, and it does so in a fresh and novel way, by blending British realism found in films like Trainspotting and Bret Easton Ellis novels with peak girlhood comedy like Mean Girls and Ladybird. Writer-director Carol Morley adapts her semi-autobiographical book of the same name, based on her childhood in 1970-80s Manchester and the music that defined this era. The film follows Ann Westbourne (played as a child by Amelie Hughes and later by Lucy Halliday) as she comes of age in Stockport, simultaneously obsessing over Joy Division with best friend Helen-Ash (Leila Entwistle) and reminiscing about the day her life changed when her father (Aidan Gillen) committed suicide. While the film partially adapts a hook found in Detroit Rock City (1999), it is nuanced enough to incorporate a harder and less idealistic look on adulthood, integrating such events as Ian Curtis’s suicide in 1980 to coincide with the closing of a relationship in Ann’s life.
The biggest draw of the film is its soundtrack moderated by Carly Paradis, keyboardist of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, who also wrote original songs for Ann’s own band Come Up With a Name (and yes, that’s the band name). Agnès Godard’s cinematography meanwhile recalls the grittiness of films like Withnail and I (1987) without losing the feminine energy of Ann’s journey. The cast, especially Lucy Halliday (you know her from The Testaments), give impeccable performances, despite a few of these at risk of becoming representative of stereotypical convention. While the third act of the film is considerably weaker, Morley introduces a hypothesis very close to real life, one that isn’t often confronted in coming-of-age films.
7 Miles Out is a definite conversation starter, with its mature themes of suicide acting as a modicum of shame in previous generations, the weight of processing the role of grief and how it defines us, and the idea of nostalgia itself for the previous decades, with the urge to put down the rose-coloured glasses.
7 Miles Out screened at the London Film Festival and will be released in UK cinemas on 17 September 2027.
