Bridgend (2015)

A sinister dread pulses through Bridgend, one that is engrossing and terrifying.

Even when the director pushes too far...the film’s formal severity feels appropriately claustrophobic — another form of authority closing in on the light.

Based on a real-life rash of teen suicides in Wales, Danish director Jeppe Rønde’s 2015 Tribeca winner feels like the sort of slow BBC America procedural you’d quickly give up on.

There’s a lot that I like about what Rønde has done here to create a mood piece that chills your bones as it crescendos into abstraction.

Bridgend does have a life on its own beyond fact, but the narrative it offers in place of the headlines only further proves how phenomena like adolescence and death is better observed, not investigated.