Category: Academic Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nando Sigona, Professor of International Migration and Forced Displacement and Director of the Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity, University of Birmingham

From February 2026, most dual British citizens will need to use a British passport to travel to the UK. Presenting only a non-British passport will no longer be sufficient for boarding flights or ferries, unless it carries a certificate (costing £589) that confirms right of abode.

The rule was introduced to align dual nationals with the UK’s new electronic travel authorisation (ETA) system and to prevent confusion in border checks.

In legal terms, nothing fundamental has changed. British citizens still have the right to enter and live in the UK. But in practice, the way that right must be demonstrated has shifted. And that shift tells us something important about how citizenship is being reshaped in the digital age.

Over the past three decades, dual citizenship has become widely accepted internationally. In 1990, fewer than a third of countries allowed dual nationality in cases of naturalisation. By 2016, roughly three-quarters did.

This change reflected globalisation. As populations became more mobile, states adapted. Migrants often maintain attachments to more than one country. Dual citizenship is a pragmatic recognition of that reality, allowing people to belong in more than one place without forcing an exclusive choice.

According to the 2021 census, 1.2% of UK-born residents (587,600) were dual citizens with another country, rising from 0.5% in 2011 (231,600). For non-UK-born residents, 6.5% were dual citizens with the UK in 2021 (648,700), up from 5.1% in 2011 (381,200).

The rise reflects broader demographic change, but it also coincided with Brexit. The number of people holding both British and EU passports increased significantly between 2011 and 2021, suggesting that many UK residents sought to retain EU citizenship protections as the UK left the EU, while some EU residents acquired British citizenship to preserve unrestricted access to the UK.

In other words, dual citizenship in the UK today includes longstanding migrant and diasporic communities, but also a growing cohort shaped by recent geopolitical change.

Digital borders

The UK’s new passport rule does not mean the country is less tolerant of dual citizens. But it is a consequence of borders becoming more digitised in recent years.

Borders today are not confined to passport control desks. They operate through airline check-in systems, pre-travel authorisations, biometric databases and algorithmic risk assessments. Airlines are required to confirm eligibility before boarding. Digital systems match names, dates of birth and passport numbers against centralised records. Such systems prioritise coherence and consistency, aiming to eliminate ambiguity.

But dual citizenship, and transnational life more broadly, produce precisely the kind of complexity that digital systems struggle to accommodate. Names may differ across jurisdictions. Marriage can produce surname changes in one country but not another. Accent marks may appear in one passport and not in its transliteration. Children born abroad may be citizens by descent but have never held a British passport.

Read more:
How the UK’s immigration system splits families apart – by design

There is little room for discretion when border checks are digitised. The administrative solution is to use the British passport when entering Britain. Yet this is not always straightforward. Some dual citizens born abroad have never needed a British passport and must now apply for one in order to travel. Others may consider renouncing British citizenship to avoid the administrative burden — but this option is not available to underage dual citizens.

Dual citizens are not a homogeneous group. They include naturalised migrants who have retained their original nationality; British-born citizens who later acquired another citizenship through residence or marriage; children of mixed-nationality families; foreign-born children of British emigrants who are citizens by descent; and members of long-established Commonwealth communities whose plural affiliations are a result of British imperial history.

For some, the new rule simply means ensuring that their British passport is valid. For others — particularly families living abroad who have never needed a British passport for their children — it introduces an unexpected bureaucratic step.

This is where borders intersect with inequality. Families with easy access to consular services, financial resources and familiarity with UK administrative systems can adapt quickly. Those living further from British bureaucratic infrastructure face greater friction.

The UK’s passport requirement is being introduced during a wider political moment in which states are exerting tighter control over citizenship. In the US, Donald Trump’s administration pledged to restrict birthright citizenship and expand the state’s power to remove citizenship.

In a number of countries, citizenship revocation powers have disproportionately targeted dual nationals, precisely because removing citizenship from mono-nationals would breach international law by rendering them stateless.

What we may be witnessing is not the retreat of dual citizenship, but its transformation. It remains widely tolerated. Yet it is increasingly bureaucratically policed.

The cumulative effect is subtle but significant. Citizenship is no longer just a legal status secured once and for all. It must remain legible to digital border systems and be continuously probed through interconnected databases.

Dual citizenship emerged as recognition that identities and attachments can be layered. Digital borders, by contrast, favour clarity and singular representation. This tension is unlikely to disappear.

The UK’s move signals how, in an era of digital borders and geopolitical uncertainty, the lived experience of citizenship is being reshaped — not through headline constitutional change, but through the quiet reorganisation of administrative systems.

Nando Sigona receives funding from UKRI for Rebordering Britain and Britons after Brexit (MIGZEN) (ES/V004530/1).

– ref. UK’s new passport rules for dual citizens are a result of border control in the digital age – https://theconversation.com/uks-new-passport-rules-for-dual-citizens-are-a-result-of-border-control-in-the-digital-age-276300

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jess Neumann, Associate Professor of Hydrology, University of Reading

Standing on the hills looking out across flat green fields, linked by a network of hedgerows, copses and small settlements, the Somerset Levels looks like quintessential English countryside.

But this region’s rivers, drains, waterways and wetlands are integral to the levels’ history – an inhospitable, and at times perilously flooded, watery world, centuries ago only habitable during the summer months.

Right now, the levels are experiencing extensive flooding, stretching for miles on all sides of any roads that are still open to vehicles. Communities are trying to cope with a relentlessly wet winter halting transport, closing schools and leaving homes underwater, underpinned by a longer-term cycle of climate and sea-level change.

This part of south-west England, much of which is currently under water, used to be known as the “land of the summer people”. Historically, frequent flooding was the main reason for purely seasonal occupation in this area bordered by the Bristol Channel and the Mendip, Quantock and Blackdown Hills. Drier summers provided valuable grazing land and plentiful resources such as fish, peat, wildfowl and reeds, while the winter months brought heavy rain and floods, forcing communities to retreat to higher ground.

The climate here, although often wet, remained broadly similar to the rest of south-west England where year-round living was commonplace. So what exactly makes the Somerset Levels so prone to flooding and why does that matter now? The answer lies in its physical geography and how water from the sea, rivers, ice and rainfall has shaped the land over time.

Let’s go back to the end of the last ice age around 10,000 years ago. Although not under ice sheets directly, the river valleys of the Somerset Levels were inundated as the glaciers melted and sea levels rose. Dry land was only found on the nearby Polden Hills and on odd humps and mounds that rose as islands amid the sea – Glastonbury Tor is perhaps the most famous in today’s landscape.

It is these hills and islands that provided safe winter havens for local people. Over the following thousands of years, the sea retreated and advanced periodically, first exposing, then flooding, the low-lying land. Wetter periods were driven by a cooler and rainier climate, increased river flows, rising sea levels and overall slow sinking of the land as a result of “isostatic readjustment” – the balancing of southern England after the weight of ice lifted at the end of the last ice age.

In response to the changes, the environment shifted from marine to brackish and freshwater conditions, initiating the formation of peat bogs as plants died in oxygen-less underwater conditions.

By the Neolithic period (4000BC-2300BC) the Somerset Levels were a vast area of freshwater wetlands and reed swamps. Human-made wooden trackways crossed the impassable reed swamps, linking the drier hills and islands upon which hunters and farmers set up base. The tracks, preserved today in the peat, point to organised use of the wetlands likely during the drier months.

Through the iron age, encroachment of the sea made much of the landscape wet again, yet evidence of semi-permanent occupation is present in the preserved lake villages, constructed on artificial foundations of timber, clay, and rubble.

Romans exploited the Somerset Levels for salt production by evaporating salt from the salt water using clay ponds (salterns) heated by peat fires.

Medieval settlers diverted the main rivers to create canal systems that helped to reduce winter flooding and reclaim agricultural land as described by in the authoritative book The Lost Islands of Somerset: Exploring A Unique Wetland Heritage. Throughout history, seasonal adaptation was the key to successful living.

Draining of the levels

Large-scale and coordinated drainage of the Somerset Levels began around the 12th century and brought about a gradual end to seasonal occupation. River embankments were constructed to reduce tidal flooding and sluices were built to manage water flow.

A criss-crossing network of drainage ditches (known as locally as rhynes) was created to carry water off the fields and into the rivers – many of these are still visible today and play a critical role in flood risk management. From the mid-18th century and into modern times, engineering such as pumps and dredging (the removal of silt, mud and vegetation from river channels) were introduced to maintain a balance between water levels and productive agricultural land.

Today, pumping remains essential to manage flood risk. Dredging, however, remains a politically contentious issue and is only used as a carefully considered method in certain places. While dredging can benefit local flood risk in the short term, the longer-term implications for nature, water quality, downstream flood risk and economic cost are now widely known.

Read more:
Britain’s relentless rain shows climate predictions playing out as expected

Today, communities have settled permanently across the Somerset Levels but the risks of living here are ever present. Rivers, many of which remain artificially modified, drain from the surrounding hills into the flat, low-lying bowl of the levels where the peat and clay soils are highly water retentive.

At times of high tide and heavy rain, tide lock, where the sea rises higher than the river level, prevents inland floodwaters from draining into the sea. This causes water to back up, overwhelming pumps and exacerbating flooding. The climate is changing – for every 1°C of warming the atmosphere can hold around 7% more moisture, increasing the risk of extreme rainfall and flooding.

Future flood risk management will continue to combine traditional engineering with more natural processes. Measures such as developing flood storage areas, wetland creation, leaky barriers, woodland planting and changing how land is farmed help intercept and slow water flow, alongside the use of pumps, drains and sluices.

However, the devastating floods of 2013-14, were a stark reminder that not so long ago, the levels were the land of the summer people. As flooding takes hold again in February 2026, it’s not clear how long year-round occupation will remain viable on the Somerset Levels.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

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Jess Neumann works at the University of Reading as an associate professor of hydrology. She is a trustee of River Mole River Watch, a water quality charity who work with, advise, and receive funding from environmental and conservation organisations and agencies, water companies, commercial services, local authorities and community groups.

– ref. This waterlogged corner of England was once only habitable during summer. Climate change could make it so again – https://theconversation.com/this-waterlogged-corner-of-england-was-once-only-habitable-during-summer-climate-change-could-make-it-so-again-275995

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Georgia Chronaki, Senior Lecturer in Developmental Neuroscience, University of Lancashire

American media personality Paris Hilton recently shared on a podcast that she suffers from rejection sensitivity dysphoria, or RSD. Hilton, who has been diagnosed with ADHD, says the condition is common in people with the disorder. She also spoke of the impact RSD has had on her mental health over the years, describing it as being “like a demon in your mind” and saying that has been “extremely painful”.

It’s important to note here that RSD is not actually a clinical condition recognised in diagnostic manuals. What Hilton might actually be referring to when she talks about RSD are two separate but closely related psychological concepts: emotional regulation and rejection sensitivity.

Emotion regulation is an umbrella term. This refers to a person’s overall ability to manage emotional reactions in any given situation. Rejection sensitivity falls under this umbrella. It is when a person has a strong emotional reaction to rejection, even perceived rejection by other people. They may experience anger, shame, shutting down and becoming defensive following criticism by others.

People who have healthy emotional regulation skills are able to keep their emotions under control, even if a situation becomes stressful or tense. They’re also less likely to develop rejection sensitivity.

While difficulties in regulating our emotions is part of being human, our life experiences can shape how each of us perceives and regulates emotions in a given situation.

For example, if growing up you had a parent who repeatedly criticised you, you may be more likely to develop low self-worth. This is because we internalise the negative things people say about us and to us. It also means that, in the future, you may be more sensitive to criticism.

How is rejection sensitivity related to ADHD?

Between 25% and 45% of children with ADHD, and 30% to 70% of adults with ADHD, have difficulties with emotion regulation.

These difficulties often manifest as catastrophising (assuming the worst outcome will happen), blaming others and feeling vulnerable to perceived rejection by others.

Perceived rejection or criticism often causes emotional discomfort, too. While some people with ADHD will try to hide their emotions when feeling rejected, others may become overwhelmed and may lash out or become disengaged. These difficulties can contribute to emotional distress and affect relationships, education and employment.

Although the causes of emotion regulation difficulties in ADHD are not fully understood, research has explored several possible mechanisms.

For instance, research my colleagues and I previously published compared the brain waves of 6- to 11-year-old boys with and without ADHD. Both groups listened to a series of angry, happy or neutral voices through headphones.

The study showed that in boys with ADHD, their brains were extra active when listening to threatening (angry) voices. These results suggested an automatic, hyper-vigilance to threat in people with ADHD.

A similar study showed that not only did young people with ADHD exhibit a larger brain reaction when rejected by their peers, they also had a smaller brain reaction when they were accepted by their peers.

Past experiences of being threatened or rejected can affect you deeply and may change how your brain develops. Although the exact mechanisms are not fully understood, research has also shown that experiences of rejection can shape how the brain develops in ADHD. For example, research found that in 9- to 13-year-olds, experiencing a greater number of stressful life events (such as being threatened) was linked with higher ADHD symptoms. In addition, children with high ADHD symptoms had differences in certain regions of their brain compared to children with low ADHD symptoms.

ADHD is not the only condition linked to rejection sensitivity. Conditions, such as autism, borderline personality disorder, depression and anxiety are also linked to rejection sensitivity.

However, the way rejection sensitivity manifests in these conditions differs. For example, people with ADHD who have rejection sensitivity may be very emotionally reactive when facing a difficult situation. But autistic people may tend to withdraw.

Managing rejection sensitivity

Some of the prescription treatments used to manage ADHD symptoms can offer some temporary relief from the emotional distress linked to rejection sensitivity. But they do not cure it.

A better strategy may be to focus instead on building environments that support wellbeing in people with ADHD rather than trying to resolve biological differences. Directing people with ADHD into areas where their strengths and interests lie may better equip them to deal with difficult situations or challenges.

Person-centred therapeutic approaches do exactly this. They aim to offer an environment, via a safe therapeutic relationship, where a person feels seen as a whole person – rather than for the problems they may have. The experience of being seen and accepted strengthens self-worth, and offers a corrective emotional experience to people who have felt criticised or judged in the past.

When people feel accepted, they start to feel more confident and rely less on negative self-talk. Recent research shows this approach can be effective for people with ADHD.

Treatments such as child-centred play therapy may be effective for children with ADHD in reducing emotion regulation difficulties – including rejection sensitivity. This therapy uses play to allow children to express their thoughts and feelings. Recent research has shown that this type of therapy is effective for improving emotional wellbeing in childhood ADHD.

In contrast, cognitive behavioural therapy focuses more on teaching you coping skills to alter so-called problem behaviours. This type of treatment can be effective for reducing ADHD symptoms but not necessarily for improving emotion regulation in ADHD.

Thanks to people like Paris Hilton, rejection sensitivity is now being talked about. This might help reduce stigma and hopefully pave the way to a more accepting, compassionate world for people with ADHD.

Georgia Chronaki does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Paris Hilton says she has ‘rejection sensitivity dysphoria’ – here’s what it is and how it’s linked to ADHD – https://theconversation.com/paris-hilton-says-she-has-rejection-sensitivity-dysphoria-heres-what-it-is-and-how-its-linked-to-adhd-275006

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lionel Smith, Horticulture lecturer, Anglia Ruskin University

Amid the wet and grey gloom of February, gardeners across the UK are reporting that crocuses are pushing through their lawns and borders weeks ahead of schedule. This phenomenon is no quirk of nature. Crocuses flowering early in 2026 is a sign of shifting seasons, driven by a unique combination of biological triggers and record-breaking UK weather patterns.

Crocuses are thermoperiodic plants, which means they rely on temperature cues rather than day length to dictate their lifecycle. Their corms (a type of bulb) also usually need a cold spell in autumn to prompt an annual reset before they will start to grow toward flowering around March.

Do the seasons feel increasingly weird to you? You’re not alone. Climate change is distorting nature’s calendar, causing plants to flower early and animals to emerge at the wrong time.

This article is part of a series, Wild Seasons, on how the seasons are changing – and what they may eventually look like.

In a typical year, this process unfolds gradually. But if soil temperatures stay mild in autumn and through December and January, as they have this winter, the reset button is not hit and crocuses can reach their flowering threshold far sooner, emerging in late January and early February rather than March.

No cold reset usually means a “blind” corm – a corm that produces leaves but no flowers. That might be expected this year, although the prior weather the UK has experienced may mitigate this.

The past two years have perfectly primed bulbs already in the ground. The year 2024 was the UK’s fourth warmest year. And last year was the UK’s warmest year on record, featuring a scorching summer and exceptional sunshine, enabling crocuses to stockpile massive energy reserves in their bulbs.

Met Office data shows the UK has three weeks fewer ground frosts annually compared to 50 years ago, preventing some plants that grow from bulbs entering their normal state of dormancy over winter. There may be more blind bulbs and corms if this trend continues.

In 2022 researchers showed that UK plants flower a full month earlier than they did before 1987. The Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s 2026 New Year Plant Hunt confirmed this, with participants spotting wildflowers and spring bulbs blooming unexpectedly in January. This is a visible signal of climate disruption. Crocuses, being more sensitive than trees or shrubs, act as canaries in the coal mine for spring shifts.

There are other influences beyond climate change that may amplify this early flowering.

Urban heat-island effect

City plants can bloom days earlier than rural ones. Concrete and asphalt trap daytime heat, radiating it overnight, which elevates local soil temperatures. Each 1°C November-December rise adds to around 2.5 more species flowering earlier in the UK.

Light pollution

Light is fundamental to plant growth. Light pollution in cities may mimic longer days, disrupting plant circadian rhythms and prompting bulbs into earlier bud-burst.

Soil microbiome

Complex soil microbe communities that thrive in warmer weather may boost flowering. Mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria form connections with plant roots that can benefit the plant. They respond to warmer soils, too, and support plants’ natural processes and accelerating growth. So warmer winters, induced by climate change, may enhance these associations. Crocuses respond particularly well to this kind of association.

Gardener’s choice

Some growers prefer varieties that flower earlier in the season, and certain species – like Crocus chrysanthus – can bloom two weeks ahead of the more common Dutch hybrids (C vernus).

Energy reserves

The more sun and warmth the bulb gets the previous summer the more energy it stores – and the more energy it has in reserve, the earlier it can flower.

This early crocus bloom may seem delightful after months of drab grey winter, but gardeners should be wary of weather reversals. Buds and flowers are more exposed if colder conditions return, meaning they may whither. Early waking pollinators like bumblebees may benefit from the unusually early feast but these kinds of abnormal timings could disrupt ecosystems outside of gardens.

Spring seems to have arrived early in 2026. As crocuses begin to carpet lawns and borders prematurely, they underscore nature’s sensitivity to our warming world. Their purple and yellow petals, pushing through in January and February rather than March, are as clear a signal as any thermometer.

Lionel Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Crocuses are blooming early – here’s what this means for nature – https://theconversation.com/crocuses-are-blooming-early-heres-what-this-means-for-nature-275041

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Anna Drury, PhD Candidate in History, Lancaster University

Much has been done, by way of interviews and Instagram reels, to market Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights as a tale of ferocious passion and untameable desire. The question of precisely whose passion we see play out onscreen is a crucial one.

Fennel says the film reflects her personal reading of Emily Brontë’s arresting tale of generational trauma, possession and violence. I had a different experience when I first read Wuthering Heights. I became immersed in a decidedly unsexy story of abuse, and had “bad dreams in the night” over Heathcliff’s brutal nature.

Nowhere is Heathcliff’s brutality more explicit than in his treatment of Isabella Linton, who becomes his wife. Isabella is the sister (or, in Fennell’s interpretation, ward) of Edgar Linton, Heathcliff’s rival for Catherine (Cathy) Earnshaw’s affections.

Heathcliff and Isabella’s marriage is marked by severe domestic and sexual abuse. In Brontë’s novel, Isabella chooses to flee Heathcliff’s tyranny and construct a life for herself independent of him. As the literary scholar Judith E. Pike notes, this was a radical transgression of historical norms, in which Victorian morality would expect her to endure such treatment for love of her husband.

Returning to the novel recently, I was struck once more by Isabella’s decimation of her husband’s propensity towards cruelty. I believe any retelling of Wuthering Heights should be faithful to, as opposed to a taming of, its radicalism. Yet when faced with Fennell’s Isabella, I encountered not the daring figure of the source text, but a doglike submissive.

Dogged desire

The words of writer Katherine Angel came to my mind upon exiting the cinema. In her work Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Angel argues that, in the wake of #MeToo, a heavy burden has been placed on women to “say what we want, and indeed know what we want” when it comes to sex and desire. It was Angel’s bold question, “Why must the secrets of desire be uncovered?” that reared its head in me after seeing Isabella on all fours.

As Angel contends, “context is everything” when it comes to desire. At first glance, Isabella (portrayed by Irish actress Alison Oliver) is the epitome of the “born sexy yesterday” trope: a female character who is at once physically mature and attractive, but has the mental faculties of an innocent, naive child. Only just coming into the world in her preliminary scenes, Isabella is a lover of dolls and ribbons, elaborate dresses and hairstyles.

It is this infantilised state, to the point of absurdity (in one scene, she unknowingly creates a scrapbook with flowers and mushrooms evoking genitalia), that makes Isabella’s sudden yearning for Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) all the more jarring. Capitalising on established fantasies of Elordi as the “I can fix him”“ archetype, Fennell renders Heathcliff the key to unlocking Isabella’s secret desires.

And yet, it is only when Heathcliff is spurned – after Catherine has (finally) put an end to their trysts – that the duty of sexually satisfying him falls to Isabella. From the moment he breaks through her bedroom window, he discloses all of his ill-intent towards Isabella.

Heathcliff not only desires her virginity (“Do you know what comes next?”) but her hand in marriage, all in the name of spiting Cathy. He repeats the refrain, “Do you want me to stop?” as he makes Isabella aware of the brutality he will bring down upon her. As he derides and undresses her, she clutches her crucifix and shakes her head to say, “No, go on.”

Deviating from Brontë’s story, Fennell’s Isabella is rendered a sexual submissive, a consenting party to her own abuse.

Making no attempt to leave him (as she does in the novel), Isabella relishes being the dog, literally leashed by Heathcliff. Rather than giving credence to Isabella’s words as they appear in the book – “The single pleasure I can imagine is to die, or to see him dead!” – in Fennell’s adaptation, Isabella’s deviant sexual desires are read through the words of her abuser: “I’ve sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure, and still creep shamefully cringing back!”

Fennell’s “uncovering” of Isabella’s secret desires helps the audience to decide, as posited by Angel, “whether a man’s actions were justified”. In order to realise her desires for Cathy and Heathcliff onscreen, Fennell’s Heathcliff must be exonerated. And he is, most grievously, through Isabella desiring to be his sexual submissive. Only then could the film’s ending play out: Heathcliff exudes Romeo as he lays beside a dead Cathy in her “skin room” tomb.

So Isabella’s desire is invoked, in accordance with Angel’s theory, as “proof that violence wasn’t, in fact, violence”. Fennel’s Heathcliff is not cruel and abusive, but a communicative and intentional dominant partner in a BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism and masochism) relationship which Isabella, as a submissive, enthusiastically consents to.

It is deeply troubling that the drive of Brontë’s Isabella, a survivor of domestic abuse, has been reread to dramatically absolve her abuser. The girl sobbing behind me as the credits rolled attests to the success of this exoneration. Really, she should be crying over the scripting of violent abuse as consensual play.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

Anna Drury receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.

– ref. In Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights, domestic abuse has been recast as consensual kink – https://theconversation.com/in-emerald-fennels-wuthering-heights-domestic-abuse-has-been-recast-as-consensual-kink-276314

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Matt Jacobsen, Senior Lecturer in Film History in the School of Society and Environment, Queen Mary University of London

Rose Byrne won a Golden Globe and is nominated for an Oscar for her performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. It’s a film about frayed mother Linda (Byrne) coping with her daughter’s strange, unspecified feeding disorder.

In director Mary Bronstein’s words, the film is “a surreal, horrifying, blackly funny portrait of a mother simultaneously kicking against and coming to terms with her maternal instincts”. Bronstein has drawn from her experiences with her own child’s illness, responding to what she sees as a gap in film and TV of authentic depictions of motherhood – or as she puts it: “Fully dimensional portraits of women who feel they can’t do it [and] are traumatised by expectations and circumstances.”

Representations of psychotherapy are foregrounded in the film. It opens in a counselling session with a paediatric specialist. An intense close-up holds on Byrne’s face as she defends herself from accusations that as a mother, she lacks boundaries and discipline. According to her daughter (Delaney Quinn): “Mommy is like putty [while] Daddy is hard.” When Linda crossly refutes the comment, the doctor tells her that “perception is reality”.

The film goes on to present the reality of Linda’s perception, as she becomes increasingly exhausted and overwhelmed, experiencing wild supernatural visions. The camera interrogates her psychologically, rarely disengaging from Byrne’s face and mostly shooting her fraught reactions in extreme close-up.

This makes for an extraordinarily intense, probing experience that requires an actor of Byrne’s level: every gesture, facial tick and shift in expression is finely calibrated. It is an unsettling choice that we are not shown her daughter’s face – the film is entirely focused on the mother’s reactions to her suffering child.

Linda is a psychotherapist who has her own psychotherapy sessions with a colleague, played superbly for comic effect by US talkshow host Conan O’Brien – who drops the charm of his host persona for a performance of harassed awkwardness.

In the tradition of TV and film psychology professionals – think Frasier Crane from Cheers! and Frasier, Robbie Coltrane’s Fitz from Cracker, Jimmy Laird from Shrinking – the film plays wholesale into the trope of therapists who appear to need therapy more urgently than their patients.

Frustrated by the apparent lack of progress in her weekly session, Linda responds to her therapist’s assurance that a line of conversation can be continued at the next session: “We won’t talk about it next time. There’s no thread, there’s no thread at all!”

Psychotherapy is a fragmentary process. As anyone who (like me) has embarked on long-term talking therapy will recognise, it is in the nature of the experience that continuity between weekly sessions is elusive. Each conversation will follow its own unexpected twists and turns, despite any concerted intention by the patient or therapist to maintain control and return to where the last session finished.

If I had Legs I’d Kick You echoes this. It becomes rambling and disjointed by design, picking up and dropping threads like the human mind in freefall.

The film trades on the cliches of how psychotherapy is commonly portrayed. Navel-gazing narcissists make unhealthy demands on Linda’s time and she has limited ability to maintain boundaries. Her own therapy sessions are fraught, combative and unhelpful, and her self-involved patients are mined for comedy and ridicule rather than sympathy and compassion.

These broad representations may be recognisable as truisms of the profession for therapists themselves, but the film shows little optimism towards talking therapy’s ultimate value.

A therapy horror film

The film deploys several conventions of the horror film in its depiction of Linda’s maternal guilt and mental unravelling. There is something of the eerie discomfort of Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) in uncanny scenes where the world around her starts to shift and contort.

In one scene, the ceiling of Linda’s apartment caves in, leaving a huge hole. As the film progresses, she returns to scrutinise it: each time the hole becomes wider, stranger and more livid. It is unclear whether this is a symbolic fantasy of Linda’s dissociative mind, or signals something more sinister and supernatural.

With its supernatural ambiguity, the film shares themes and style with last year’s Nightbitch, adapted from Rachel Yoder’s novel, which featured a brittle, vulnerable and very funny performance from Amy Adams as the struggling mother of a toddler.

Read more:
A new wave of filmmakers are exploring motherhood’s discontents. Nightbitch makes this monstrous

The mothers in both films find solace in the suburban streets at night, away from public scrutiny, where they are unguarded and free to express their unvarnished selves. While Adams’s character in Nightbitch morphs into a predatory hound prowling the neighbourhood, Linda seeks escape through late-night drinking. She attempts to relive her carefree youth by taking drugs with her neighbour James, played sympathetically and with nuance by American rapper A$AP Rocky.

A series of cameos by instantly recognisable male actors is distracting and derails the film rather than aiding it. It is jarring to watch Danny Devito as a parody of an officious parking lot attendant, and a curious choice to feature the instantly identifiable voice of Christian Slater as Linda’s absent husband Charles. The comic effect of these intrusions took me out of the moment and jarred with the emotional intensity the film strives for.

Bronstein sets out to establish mood and ratchet tension to often unbearable levels. As the film reaches its crescendo, it becomes increasingly fraught and formless.

While Nightbitch suffered from an over-neat tying together of plot strands in its final minutes, here the opposite may be true. Perhaps that’s why, though Byrne is deserving of her best actress nomination, the film has not received Oscar nominations in any other category.

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Matt Jacobsen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a warts-and-all portrait of a psychotherapist struggling with an ailing daughter – https://theconversation.com/if-i-had-legs-id-kick-you-is-a-warts-and-all-portrait-of-a-psychotherapist-struggling-with-an-ailing-daughter-276346

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Catherine Wheatley, Lecturer in Film Studies, King’s College London

Mona Fastvold’s film about Ann Lee – the founder of the Shaker religious movement – is raw, intense and deeply physical. If you were to consult the leading critics of Christianity in film they would probably tell you that the best films in this genre are not like The Testament of Ann Lee at all.

These thinkers save their highest praise for films that are aesthetically minimal and grounded in reality, often using documentary filming techniques.

Tonally, these films are quiet and stripped back. They present a vision of faith that leans into quiet devotion and sufferance rather than the wild abandon of religious ecstasy. Think, for example, of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1963), Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthasar(1966) or, in more recent years, Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017).

The Testament of Ann Lee cuts through such male-dominated visions of religious experience. It offers a spectacle of transcendence, which is achieved not through restraint, but through a kind of carnal maximalism.

Shot by cinematographer William Rexer on 35mm, this is a richly textured, painterly film. At the centre of it is a performance of extreme physicality by Amanda Seyfried, best known to many viewers as the lovelorn gamine of Phyllida Lloyd’s 2008 Mamma Mia!

The Testament of Ann Lee is a very different sort of musical to Lloyd’s film, or indeed Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables (2012), in which Seyfried starred as Cosette. And Ann Lee is a very different type of heroine from those Seyfried has played before.

We first meet Ann as a young girl in 1770s Manchester, where she is an unwilling witness to her parents’ nightly conjugal rites. This embeds a deep-seated anxiety around sex that manifests as a series of baroque visions of Eden – a girthy snake insinuating its way across the screen and through Ann’s dreams.

Marriage to handsome blacksmith Abraham Standerin (Christopher Abbott), with his predilection for BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism) and blowjobs, exacerbates her unease. Four gruelling, bloody births and four gutting losses of children before any has reached the age of one, tips her into celibacy.

She renounces the sins of the flesh entirely, and somewhat paradoxically (considering how humans are made) pronounces total abstinence as humanity’s only route to salvation. Her brother William (Lewis Pullman) is quick to follow her lead, giving up his male lover and following her to east coast America, where “Mother Ann” will found an entire community of like-minded souls, but lose her husband in the process.

With all this grief and death and self-denial, one might expect Fastvold’s film to tend towards bleakness. But relief comes in the form of the film’s musical numbers.
As a young woman, Lee is introduced to Jane and James Wardley (Stacy Martin and Scott Handy), “Shaking Quakers” who preach that Jesus’s second coming will be a woman and embrace impromptu song and dance as part of worship. The film’s ostensibly spontaneous moments of wild abandon are rearrangements of traditional Shaker hymns by composer Daniel Blumberg, who previously worked on The Brutalist (co-written by Fastvold and director husband Brady Corbett, who also has a writing a credit here). These songs are sung by Seyfried and British avant-garde jazz and free-improvising vocalist Phil Minton’s Feral Choir, with a rough, nonprofessional vigour.

Choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall took inspiration from historical illustrations of Shaker dances, the contemporary rave scene and the sect’s famed craftmanship in architecture, woodworking and joinery. These facets came together in a style of movement that is “very rounded and defined … nothing jagged or anything sharp”.

The dances are trancelike, ecstatic, almost orgiastic, as if all the sexual energies of Lee and her fellow Shakers has been turned towards the heavens. At moments I was reminded of Paul Verhoeven’s lusty lesbian melodrama Benedetta (2021), in which Virginie Efira’s novice nun carves a homemade dildo from a statuette of the virgin Mary.

Indeed, there is a gentle strain of queerness that runs through Lee’s most tender and enduring relationship, with close friend Mary Partington (Thomasin MacKenzie). Partington is the film’s narrator and the closest thing to an audience proxy – the Nick Carraway to Lee’s Jay Gatsby. Her voiceover is taken in part from the real testament published after Lee’s death by her fellow Shakers.

Framing Lee’s story with this loving testimony to her enduring impact redoubles the film’s feminist bent. Yes, Lee suffers – terribly so. (Among other things, Fastvold’s film is, like The Brutalist, a critique of modern America; the spectres of racism, xenophobia and misogyny skitter around its edges.)

But what we bear witness to, along with Mary, is far from a depressing catalogue of miseries. Rather, The Testament of Ann Lee is a gorgeous, muscular celebration of transcendence through joy, of female solidarity and leadership, and of the power of film to make, rather than veil, religious experience spectacular.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

Catherine Wheatley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Testament of Ann Lee – a gorgeous celebration of transcendence through joy and religious experience – https://theconversation.com/the-testament-of-ann-lee-a-gorgeous-celebration-of-transcendence-through-joy-and-religious-experience-276302