‘I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning’ Cannes Review: Clio Barnard Returns With A Raw And Vital Portrait Of Working-Class Birmingham

Part Trainspotting in its explosive energy, part Ken Loach in its social grounding, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning carries the kinetic charge of Danny Boyle’s classic while anchoring itself more firmly in questions of class and community. The film follows five friends in their twenties from Birmingham, each at a different crossroads in life, but always there for one another — especially when the night calls for drinking and dancing.

Rian (Joe Cole) is the one who escaped: a lucky inheritance investment turned him into a millionaire, and he now lives in a sleek but somewhat soulless flat in a new part of London. He clearly misses home, though, and is visibly more alive in the company of his old friends. Patrick (Anthony Boyle) and Shiv (Lola Petticrew) are married with two kids, scraping by on his delivery job while she manages the house and the children. Conor (Daryl McCormack) is overseeing the construction of a residential building on a site where social housing once stood — with Rian as his main investor — and Oli (Jay Lycurgo) is the one in the deepest trouble, making ends meet by dealing heroin.

But they have each other, and the bond between them runs deeper than the distance their circumstances have put between them. Conor hires Oli on the construction site despite his total lack of experience. Patrick pulls Rian back from the edge when a breakup with a girlfriend — too posh, too far from his world — sends him spiraling. The film is at its best, in fact, when it isn’t really telling a story at all: when it simply lives alongside these characters, in their chaotic nights out and their quieter, separate moments.

At a certain point, however, the screenplay’s machinery becomes too visible. Conflicts are intensified, drama is pushed toward unlikely extremes, and while the emotional impact is real, the plotting starts to feel forced. Secrets surface and break relationships apart; some characters drink themselves past any reasonable limit; others stumble into life-altering encounters overnight.

The cumulative effect is a dramatic avalanche, but I See Buildings… loses something in the process — it starts to feel like a film in the more conventional, constructed sense of the word, and the natural energy and spontaneity of its first and better hour begins to drain away. It’s a problem Barnard also ran into with her previous feature, Ali & Ava: a genuinely exciting setup that the third act doesn’t quite know how to honor.

Still, the director of The Arbor continues to demonstrate an exceptional eye and ear for the habits, textures, and vernacular of British working-class life, while remaining alert to the fault lines within it — those who went to university, those who got lucky, those who never found a way out. It’s a hard world, and often an abrasive one, but it’s held together, fundamentally, by friendship, solidarity, and the simple fact of showing up for one another.

There’s a scene midway through where Patrick and Rian debate what should become of the flats Conor is building, and in Patrick’s brief, charged monologue, the film — and the Keiran Goddard novel it’s based on — makes its position plain: this world, with effort, can still belong to its community. If it doesn’t fight for that, it will simply be sold to whoever can pay the most.