Besides These Walls takes place in an undetermined period of time in an unnamed British cityscape where nameless characters ebb and flow through the cracks of a vast, cold urban environment, haunted by cold skeletons with concrete, plaster, and fleshy divides. The script is more poetry than prose and the continuous internal monologue reveals three main characters equally alive, yet devastatingly equally lifeless: a single man, a single building, a moth. Interlinking each of their voices is the desire to reach a dialogue but it's not certain they even know who with. Perhaps simply just another. These internal cognitions of theirs; the coded flare signals they send to outer space from their soulscapes as they seek to make contact, make us see them for who they are. Once we can focus in on the space created between the overlap of their songs against the grey canvas, they are all heard and we can't stop watching them. The central character, walks and grasps, drinks and stumbles and sweats. Always alone. His existential suffering is clear. He knows something is out there, he just doesn't know how to reach it. The shots of his inebriated comings and goings from the building, his close encounters with the walls and moments on the floor, give the viewer a sense that the building, too, has the same desire. We watch the moth flit in struggled flight, conflictually navigating the artificial light of the apartment and the confines of the space. Yet, there is still a fourth character: the girl next door, who is seen and felt and discovered somehow only by these external sources. She never speaks and we see what we believe to be her world, somehow aware she can only be identified by what we do not know about her. Like so many muses before her, we know she is out there, but we do not know how to get there.
Mark Phelan delivers the narration of this original script and story beautifully throughout. It's up to the audience to navigate the subtle weaving of the text and up to each to make that brutal decision whether to separate the voices into isolated characters or not. Phelan's role as the central character is equally powerful and captivating, demanding the viewer's full attention: turning away is not an option. The director's choice to shoot fluid and continuous scenes in single takes against stark and provoking urban squalor shows his skill as an cinematographer and establishes this film as a work of art. Jules Bishop is able to draw us in with equally fluidity to the details of a palm of a hand and the outstretched fingers of the outline of a high-rise against the sky.
For those intrigued by and engaged with the themes presented in this film, one viewing will surely not be enough. It is a beautifully written, acted, and directed film whose universal subject of modern loneliness and isolation is a portrait that speaks to us all.
