Sometimes the slovenly industrial mechanisms of traditional film production are just not the right fit for certain projects. British filmmaker Marc Issacs, known for his eccentric riffs on classical documentary form, heads out to the metaphysical wilds of Thaxted in Essex for his strange and intriguing new film, This Blessed Plot, which seeks to demolish certain truisms about that fragile line between objective reality and subjective performance.

This is the story of softly-spoken Chinese filmmaker Lori (Yingge Lori Yang) who has travelled to Thaxted in search of a subject for her new work. When she encounters and converses with the ghost of Conrad le Despenser Noel, a socialist priest who died in 1942, she decides that it’s probably best she stick around and see what other spectral shenanigans that this sleepy burg has to offer.

Soon after she meets Keith (Keith Martin), a rabid Arsenal football fan and long-time collector of signed trinkets. He invites her to his house to survey his hokey museum of merchandise, and while there she hears of his sadness at the recent departure of his wife and bookkeeper, Sue (Sue Mallendine). Eventually Lori encounters Sue’s ghost who delivers a series of cryptic clues to pass back to Keith, along with the revelation that she may not have been the faithful wife he believed her to be.

Keith is a solid bloke, but, it transpires, a terrible judge of character, and he’s being diddled by everyone in his small sphere. Eventually, it’s Lori who bares the brunt of his anger, but she decides to stay the course in the name art and seeing where the story takes her.

The plot of the film is somewhat unwieldy in the way it is delivered, with a palpable (purposeful?) lack of basic finesse to the performances, the writing and the camerawork. There’s no undue aestheticization of the working class lives on show, but the film’s ugliness does little truly coax us into this world. Yet Issacs’ deeper exploration of class representation on screen and the past as represented and remembered through the physical landscape, as well as his attempts to create a work of fluid fiction under the on-the-lam constraints of documentary reportage, still translate despite all the formal barriers.

Sometimes it feels as if this is the film that Issacs was able to make rather than the one he wanted to, as the intellectual ambition is diluted by the fact that more energy must be spent attempting to discern the maker’s motives than it can on the emotional intricacies of the drama. But there is the sense that some of the alienation tactics are carefully choreographed, and Issacs wants to take us as far outside of our comfort zone as we are willing to go.

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