Hallam Foe

19/11/2025

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Hallam Foe’s strength is that it takes advantage of Edinburgh locations, with director David MacKenzie saying, “I knew it was about a troubled adolescent and Edinburgh rooftops, and those were the two things I kind of latched onto…” (Collider) “Edinburgh is a sort of gothic fairytale city and it can be a gothic horror city as well. It lends itself to that rooftop world…If you set Hallam Foe in Manhattan, Hallam would have to be Spiderman.” (Guardian)
Edinburgh is a city almost as famous as Manhattan for its skyline, but obviously for antithetical reasons. New York is the quintessential modern city: the one that didn’t quite give birth to the term skyscraper (Chicago built the first) but became synonymous with it, with the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Centre, and the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. If New York became Gotham city, Edinburgh, long before it, had been Gothic city, a skyline made up not of modernity’s masterpieces but medieval and post-medieval hymns that suggested God rather than Mammon. Edinburgh is a great city of spires over aspirations, with St Mary’s Episcopal church, Barclay Viewforth Church, the Hub and the Scott Monument, all vital to the city’s skyline. But these are buildings of modest height (the Empire State Building is 443 metres; the Scott Monument is 61), and MacKenzie is correct to admit there wouldn’t be much wonderment in showing Hallam (Jamie Bell) scaling Edinburgh's tall buildings, even if there could be more than enough excitement were the film interested in suspense. How many action films from The Bourne Ultimatum to A Quantum of Solace rely on getting the viewer worked up by characters dangling off roofs or running from one building to another, with a chasm in between?
    But Hallam Foe isn’t really a film about the city’s architecture nor a thriller, but closer to a psychological drama about a troubled teenager living in the Borders who is sure his dad and his new wife have been responsible for his mother’s death. This is Hamlet with a twist, but it is more about the twisted mind of a boy who finds various ways to deal with the loss. He indulges in what has been called maladaptive grieving as he insists on a murder that isn’t, sleeps with his stepmother, Verity (Claire Forlaine) and runs away to the Scottish capital. He also, and more especially, projects onto a hotel administrator Kate (Sophia Myles) while in Edinburgh, one who looks a heck of a lot like his late mum. It doesn’t help that he spies on her through the window in the attic apartment where she lives. This is the Jocasta syndrome meeting Rear Window: he wishes not just to sleep with his mother, but looks at her in various moments of privacy before doing so. He is both a pervert and a voyeur, if we accept that the wish to sleep with one’s mother is a perversion of sexual norms (one of the few still in place and helps justify Freud’s insistence on the incest taboo), and that scopophilia is an ocular intrusion, a bit like breaking into someone’s property with one’s eyes.
  Yet the film is quite breezy about its maladaptive protagonist, perhaps seeing a more sympathetic and agreeable figure than the audience. Scottish cinema isn’t afraid of antiheroic characters whose positive qualities outweigh by the smallest of margins the negative ones. Renton in Trainspotting sleeps with an underage girl, destroys a friend’s relationship, hooks him on heroin and, at the end, screws over his mates. In Sweet Sixteen, Liam is willing to hook up with gangsters and betray his best friend in his determination to provide his mum with a home when she gets out of prison. In MacKenzie’s earlier Young Adam, the central character Joe sleeps with his friend’s wife and also allows a woman he knew to drown after she tells him she is pregnant with his child. We needn’t say much about Shallow Grave: odious characters all, even if we might show some interest in their dilemma over a bag of cash.
  However, these films work to varying degrees, as we believe Hallam Foe does not. There are numerous ways in which filmmakers can make an unsympathetic character agreeable enough within the context of a film’s running time: for Liam, the ends justify the means; for Renton, we know he must escape his environment; in Shallow Grave, the film wonders what we might do if we came across a suitcase full of money. The film may play up design (as Shallow Grave does), and/or humour (evident in Trainspotting). It can play up moral turpitude and know that we will muse over the societal malaise that can lead Joe to letting someone die and to sleep with a friend’s wife (Young Adam). However, the problem with Hallam Foe is that the film seems too enamoured by Hallam’s perspective, partly reflected in the form and often more so in the dramatic exchanges.
   Like many a film from the early years of the 21st century, Hallam Foe stays close to the character’s movements through space.  We see it in other Scottish films like Morvern Callar and Red Road, a sort of limpet cinema showing the camera often as if on the character’s shoulder. It can give a film great immediacy, but can also rob it of a perspective much greater than the character’s own. Hallam Foe takes us into Hallam’s world, but this is one so erroneous, so fantastically conjured up and ethically dubious, we might expect the film to reveal itself as a fever fantasy, the confused, exuberant thoughts of a boy trying to achieve manhood while feeling emotionally emasculated by his mother’s loss. Instead, there is no such revelation, and the closest is that his father (Ciaran Hinds) didn’t try to stop Hallam’s mother from taking her life. She clearly wanted to die, and Hallam has to accept that he or his sister wasn’t reason enough for her to remain alive.
  Yet the film presents this as all about Hallam: that he will have to come to terms with a mother who is dead but isn’t expected to be contrite over blaming his father and Verity for that demise, even though he has systematically insulted her and tried to drown her in the lake. The film offers a sort of maladaptive immunity: because Hallam is grieving, he cannot be expected to conform to socially acceptable rules. Yet if that hadn't been bad enough, the maladaptation incorporates other characters, making the film implausible. Even if we accept that Verity might sleep with this teenager, it would rest on a plausibility from elsewhere. It seems unlikely that the elegant and attractive Verity would sleep with the teen son of her husband without an ulterior motive, and that motive is removed when, at the end of the film, she seems to have had nothing to do with Hallam’s mother’s death. Did she sleep with him so that he would run away (as he does), or because she finds this youth devastatingly attractive? The former seems too weak a reason to sleep with her husband’s son, and in the latter case, the film offers none of the sexual motivation and desire that would justify such a scene, the sort of iconography built out of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, where a sexually frustrated wife lusts after a youthful and virile man.
   Equally, the relationship he develops with the hotel administrator is unlikely, not because a pretty and busy professional wouldn’t have time for a teen kitchen porter, but because the film doesn’t really justify why she would be interested. Films are often lazy when they rely on easy assumptions, but they are often improbable when they remove them, but don’t create the complexity to justify the unlikely or the perverse. When a romantic comedy crosscuts between two beautiful people going about their business, we expect them to meet and aren’t surprised when they fall in love. It isn’t unlikely — the problem is that filmically it is all too likely. We are in the language of romantic comedy clichés. It is thus great when a filmmaker resists such obviousness, but Hallam Foe replaces it without doing the work that justifies the eschewal. Kate explains her attraction to Hallam by saying she likes creepy guys, yet if that was all she sought, we wouldn’t believe in her attraction to her lover, either, the one who also works in the hotel and is married with a child. What convinces us of her relationship with this odious figure is the hurried and excited sex we see Hallam witnessing between Kate and this man. He may be an adulterer, a bully and a creep, but we can see that he satisfies Kate’s basic needs. What does Hallam provide?
     There might have potentially been an interesting story here about a young man drawn to a slightly older woman who happens to resemble his mother, and a woman in her late twenties feeling a little broody and seeing Hallam as more son than hunk, while he sees it more the other way round: seeing her as a sex goddess to look up to. It isn’t the film’s perversity one attacks, more its unwillingness to make that perversity dramatically plausible. “Most adolescents are Hallam Foes”, Mackenzie says. “I would love it if confused and fucked-up teenagers among our population get to see it; that would be very gratifying. It certainly doesn't patronise teenagers.” (Guardian) It undeniably doesn’t do that: it instead fulfils more of their fantasies, an adolescent immunity to put alongside its maladaptive excuses.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Hallam Foe

  

 

Hallam Foe’s strength is that it takes advantage of Edinburgh locations, with director David MacKenzie saying, “I knew it was about a troubled adolescent and Edinburgh rooftops, and those were the two things I kind of latched onto…” (Collider) “Edinburgh is a sort of gothic fairytale city and it can be a gothic horror city as well. It lends itself to that rooftop world…If you set Hallam Foe in Manhattan, Hallam would have to be Spiderman.” (Guardian)
Edinburgh is a city almost as famous as Manhattan for its skyline, but obviously for antithetical reasons. New York is the quintessential modern city: the one that didn’t quite give birth to the term skyscraper (Chicago built the first) but became synonymous with it, with the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Centre, and the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. If New York became Gotham city, Edinburgh, long before it, had been Gothic city, a skyline made up not of modernity’s masterpieces but medieval and post-medieval hymns that suggested God rather than Mammon. Edinburgh is a great city of spires over aspirations, with St Mary’s Episcopal church, Barclay Viewforth Church, the Hub and the Scott Monument, all vital to the city’s skyline. But these are buildings of modest height (the Empire State Building is 443 metres; the Scott Monument is 61), and MacKenzie is correct to admit there wouldn’t be much wonderment in showing Hallam (Jamie Bell) scaling Edinburgh's tall buildings, even if there could be more than enough excitement were the film interested in suspense. How many action films from The Bourne Ultimatum to A Quantum of Solace rely on getting the viewer worked up by characters dangling off roofs or running from one building to another, with a chasm in between?
    But Hallam Foe isn’t really a film about the city’s architecture nor a thriller, but closer to a psychological drama about a troubled teenager living in the Borders who is sure his dad and his new wife have been responsible for his mother’s death. This is Hamlet with a twist, but it is more about the twisted mind of a boy who finds various ways to deal with the loss. He indulges in what has been called maladaptive grieving as he insists on a murder that isn’t, sleeps with his stepmother, Verity (Claire Forlaine) and runs away to the Scottish capital. He also, and more especially, projects onto a hotel administrator Kate (Sophia Myles) while in Edinburgh, one who looks a heck of a lot like his late mum. It doesn’t help that he spies on her through the window in the attic apartment where she lives. This is the Jocasta syndrome meeting Rear Window: he wishes not just to sleep with his mother, but looks at her in various moments of privacy before doing so. He is both a pervert and a voyeur, if we accept that the wish to sleep with one’s mother is a perversion of sexual norms (one of the few still in place and helps justify Freud’s insistence on the incest taboo), and that scopophilia is an ocular intrusion, a bit like breaking into someone’s property with one’s eyes.
  Yet the film is quite breezy about its maladaptive protagonist, perhaps seeing a more sympathetic and agreeable figure than the audience. Scottish cinema isn’t afraid of antiheroic characters whose positive qualities outweigh by the smallest of margins the negative ones. Renton in Trainspotting sleeps with an underage girl, destroys a friend’s relationship, hooks him on heroin and, at the end, screws over his mates. In Sweet Sixteen, Liam is willing to hook up with gangsters and betray his best friend in his determination to provide his mum with a home when she gets out of prison. In MacKenzie’s earlier Young Adam, the central character Joe sleeps with his friend’s wife and also allows a woman he knew to drown after she tells him she is pregnant with his child. We needn’t say much about Shallow Grave: odious characters all, even if we might show some interest in their dilemma over a bag of cash.
  However, these films work to varying degrees, as we believe Hallam Foe does not. There are numerous ways in which filmmakers can make an unsympathetic character agreeable enough within the context of a film’s running time: for Liam, the ends justify the means; for Renton, we know he must escape his environment; in Shallow Grave, the film wonders what we might do if we came across a suitcase full of money. The film may play up design (as Shallow Grave does), and/or humour (evident in Trainspotting). It can play up moral turpitude and know that we will muse over the societal malaise that can lead Joe to letting someone die and to sleep with a friend’s wife (Young Adam). However, the problem with Hallam Foe is that the film seems too enamoured by Hallam’s perspective, partly reflected in the form and often more so in the dramatic exchanges.
   Like many a film from the early years of the 21st century, Hallam Foe stays close to the character’s movements through space.  We see it in other Scottish films like Morvern Callar and Red Road, a sort of limpet cinema showing the camera often as if on the character’s shoulder. It can give a film great immediacy, but can also rob it of a perspective much greater than the character’s own. Hallam Foe takes us into Hallam’s world, but this is one so erroneous, so fantastically conjured up and ethically dubious, we might expect the film to reveal itself as a fever fantasy, the confused, exuberant thoughts of a boy trying to achieve manhood while feeling emotionally emasculated by his mother’s loss. Instead, there is no such revelation, and the closest is that his father (Ciaran Hinds) didn’t try to stop Hallam’s mother from taking her life. She clearly wanted to die, and Hallam has to accept that he or his sister wasn’t reason enough for her to remain alive.
  Yet the film presents this as all about Hallam: that he will have to come to terms with a mother who is dead but isn’t expected to be contrite over blaming his father and Verity for that demise, even though he has systematically insulted her and tried to drown her in the lake. The film offers a sort of maladaptive immunity: because Hallam is grieving, he cannot be expected to conform to socially acceptable rules. Yet if that hadn't been bad enough, the maladaptation incorporates other characters, making the film implausible. Even if we accept that Verity might sleep with this teenager, it would rest on a plausibility from elsewhere. It seems unlikely that the elegant and attractive Verity would sleep with the teen son of her husband without an ulterior motive, and that motive is removed when, at the end of the film, she seems to have had nothing to do with Hallam’s mother’s death. Did she sleep with him so that he would run away (as he does), or because she finds this youth devastatingly attractive? The former seems too weak a reason to sleep with her husband’s son, and in the latter case, the film offers none of the sexual motivation and desire that would justify such a scene, the sort of iconography built out of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, where a sexually frustrated wife lusts after a youthful and virile man.
   Equally, the relationship he develops with the hotel administrator is unlikely, not because a pretty and busy professional wouldn’t have time for a teen kitchen porter, but because the film doesn’t really justify why she would be interested. Films are often lazy when they rely on easy assumptions, but they are often improbable when they remove them, but don’t create the complexity to justify the unlikely or the perverse. When a romantic comedy crosscuts between two beautiful people going about their business, we expect them to meet and aren’t surprised when they fall in love. It isn’t unlikely — the problem is that filmically it is all too likely. We are in the language of romantic comedy clichés. It is thus great when a filmmaker resists such obviousness, but Hallam Foe replaces it without doing the work that justifies the eschewal. Kate explains her attraction to Hallam by saying she likes creepy guys, yet if that was all she sought, we wouldn’t believe in her attraction to her lover, either, the one who also works in the hotel and is married with a child. What convinces us of her relationship with this odious figure is the hurried and excited sex we see Hallam witnessing between Kate and this man. He may be an adulterer, a bully and a creep, but we can see that he satisfies Kate’s basic needs. What does Hallam provide?
     There might have potentially been an interesting story here about a young man drawn to a slightly older woman who happens to resemble his mother, and a woman in her late twenties feeling a little broody and seeing Hallam as more son than hunk, while he sees it more the other way round: seeing her as a sex goddess to look up to. It isn’t the film’s perversity one attacks, more its unwillingness to make that perversity dramatically plausible. “Most adolescents are Hallam Foes”, Mackenzie says. “I would love it if confused and fucked-up teenagers among our population get to see it; that would be very gratifying. It certainly doesn't patronise teenagers.” (Guardian) It undeniably doesn’t do that: it instead fulfils more of their fantasies, an adolescent immunity to put alongside its maladaptive excuses.

© Tony McKibbin