Three times i've seen this without being able to write about it. Watching it feels as painful as the pain its trying to show."It hurts when we love somebody. Because loving is a painful thing. That is its nature. Our loving is hurting us" reads dumpy adolescent Gail (what is the book? My guess is R D Laing) "Love hurts" is the over-riding (sometimes overbearing) theme of the film. The thematic treatment supplants any kind of plot or through-run story.Therefore condense drama to concentrate emotion: still the life, compose the frame, minimalise the dialogue. No panning or tracking or moving off with camera. Stay still. Be here. With this that hurts. The effect is to feel oppressively overloaded on monochromal, monotonal, misery.This is all stylistically engaging. Racing in the car fast down a dark country lane; all the sound is cut except for the 2 boys talking – like being immersed inside the bubble of them, cut off from the outside, focused right in to the heart of their isolation.Better Things is relentlessly, almost - courageously - grim. A lot of very miserable face going on. Faces without smiles, without warmth, lacking, unwarmed by love. Faces of lads are all so null and void its hard to distinguish one from the other.All is shadow and blue inertia, with very little light to provide contrast.This isn't so much about the perils of doing drugs. It's about how difficult it is to love when love feels out of reach. Deprived of love, life disappears, becomes denuded – gets gloomily unbearable. Seems to be the message.Disturbingly, the setting isn't inner-city London, Manchester – but the least place you'd expect to see urban anomie and alienation, – the supposedly "lovely" Costwolds.I'll be saving this film. Doubt I'll want to watch it another 3 times though.

I feel that this is a well executed film. In the film there is a real sense of desperation, loss and despair, and I feel that this is accentuated in the way that it is shot and also the music that is used. A sense of reality features very prominently within the film and although there isn't much in common with me and any of the characters, I find myself feeling sorry for them but also getting angry at the same time with some of them over the drug use. I actually felt quite shell shocked at the end, not because of the ending or the drug use but because there was lots going on within the film. Everyone had their own little narrative, which was neatly woven into the main theme of the film. I liked the monologue from the girl at the beginning of the film and also how we came back to it at the end. Overall an interesting film and as I say in my summary could have been a little shorter.

The most sombre and grey film i have ever seen. Scandinavian films are blue, this British film is very grey and is like the British version of Requiem for a dream.Life is not such a dingy grey, it is like a pinkish glow, on grey.The heartache of drug taking and brain sprouting fungus.You need to have a lead lined stomach to fully enjoy this, but if you like films like the Machinist and Requiem for a dream, then you should like this film.The horrors of death and drug taking in a sombre area of the British countryside and towns.

...Bruno Dumont. I've read a lot of reviews lauding this supposedly great example of British art-house cinema. Even Sight and Sound made it film of the month. But the facts are simple, everything about it says the filmmaker is in thrall to the work of Bruno Dumont, particularly La Vie de Jesus and L'Humanite. And why not, they are magnificent films.Unfortunately it only goes to highlight the miserable state of British art-house and British film-making in general that this is held up as a fine example of it when all it does is rip off the style and downbeat content of Dumont's great works. For the unforgiving Northern France landscape of Dumont substitute the Cotswolds and you've got it.In fact its worth pointing out that the similarities in the prolonged static widescreen shots and the dull grey cinematography, so perfectly mimic L'Humanite especially that one would almost believe the filmmaker had had the audacity to give the colourist a copy of that film and then have him match the shots one by one.But no filmmaker could be that cynical or unoriginal. Could they? 2 stars for the perfectly copied photography.