Unhappy holidays in Archipelago

She's one of few film-makers who escape workaday television to find totally new challenges. Even more than Unrelated, the chamber-like Archipelago challenges us too. Quite severely at times.

The setting is a rented house on the Scilly island of Tresco, where Edward (Tom Hiddleston) joins his older sister, Cynthia (Lydia Leonard), and his mother, Patricia (Kate Fahy), before leaving for a spell of volunteer work in Africa. There's a young cook (Amy Lloyd), whom Edward
is vaguely interested in, and Christopher (Christopher Baker), Patricia's painting teacher, in the mix too.

Not a lot happens. There's a picnic, an unsatisfactory meal at a local restaurant, rows, resentments and the feeling that perhaps Edward is being unwise about going to Africa.

When the family finally leaves the island, you don't feel they've had a very good time of it. They are the sort of generally reserved middle-class English people who don't seem to like each other or anybody else much.

Not even the boyish Edward can cope with it - and, worse for him, he hasn't been allowed to bring his girlfriend along because she is "just someone you are attracted to" and not part of the family. The other absentee is Will, apparently a negligent husband and father.

Such a film, during which nothing really happens except an emotional catharsis that rises up and subsides like the tides around the island, has to be carefully handled to avoid dramatic stasis.

And Hogg, though a fine film-maker, doesn't always prevent us feeling that these people are not worth worrying about.

The long takes, the recording of seemingly casual conversations and cinematographer Ed Rutherford's muted colouring lend credence to the film but hardly excitement.

Archipelago is more spartan and austere than Unrelated, which itself puzzled some by its refusal to go expected ways. This is both Hogg's strength and weakness. Echoing Francis Bacon, she says she was "throwing paint on the canvas to see what happens".

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, which is rather like the middle-class family life she so obsessively traces. Next time out, one hopes for a broader canvas and a bit more paint.

Archipelago
Cert: 15