Bait

It’s a genuine modern masterpiece, which establishes Jenkin as one of the most arresting and intriguing British film-makers of his generation.

Ultimately a small tale of the struggles of ordinary working-class people against the tourist trade, in a wider political context, the film exists in a deeply contemporary space. Through its filmmaking craft, this debut remarkably operates in a timeless space.

The engaging and defiantly hand-crafted, offbeat experiment Bait may be black and white, but its insights, thankfully, come in subtly graded shades of gray.

Jenkin's heavily stylized debut is a disorienting experience at first, but it ultimately creates a boldly Expressionistic mood of uncanny beauty and mesmerizing otherness.

What an intriguing and unexpectedly watchable film. Bait is an experiment – and a successful one.

Bait functions on a subliminal level. A concoction of illogical insert shots, mismatched sound, and nonlinear edits, it has little regard for a cinematically conventional sense of time and space.

That the story doesn’t play like a soap, or indeed a Ken Loach film, is down to the director’s technical and narrative approach.