BLACKPOOL

"Blackpool" is a love letter written in smudged ink, torn at the edges, and stuffed in the back pocket of a man who's already halfway out the door. It’s a film that dances precariously on the knife-edge between comedy and tragedy, understanding that sometimes the two are so entangled you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. Billy is a man with nothing left to give. Life has hollowed him out, left him rattling with the quiet ache of disappointment. So he returns to Blackpool, the town of childhood joy and adult disillusionment, not to find himself—but to disappear entirely. 

From the off, there’s a morbid inevitability to Billy’s spiral. His suicide attempts carry a strange, pathetic poetry—a man standing in front of a tram with the grim awareness that it’s more likely to stop for him than kill him. That’s the cruel humour of it all: the very world he’s trying to escape won’t even let him go out cleanly. Billy trudges through Blackpool’s garish seafront like a ghost in the making, drinking, smoking, and drifting toward his conclusion with the weary resignation of a man whose life has been shaped by a series of small defeats. The town itself feels complicit, its bright lights and cheap thrills masking a deeper rot—empty promises baked into the worn fabric of a place long past its prime. 

But "Blackpool" isn’t interested in offering clean resolutions. Billy’s spiral continues, dragging him through the underbelly of the town as he sinks deeper into drink, drugs, and the detached haze of someone who’s already mentally signed off. The town and all the memories it holds becomes oppressive rather than inviting. Billy is both part of this landscape and entirely separate from it, a man dissolving into the static of the world around him. 

And yet, in the midst of this self-destruction, Billy stumbles across something stranger than his own despair. A man in a parrot costume, soaked and stumbling through the waves of the ocean, his movements weighed down by more than just the fabric. Billy’s instinctive decision to run in and pull him back from the brink isn’t grand or heroic—it’s messy and desperate, a shared act of survival between two men dressed in different types of armour. The sight of a grown man in a parrot costume should feel ridiculous, but in that moment, it’s disarmingly human. "Blackpool" finds truth in the absurdity, suggesting that sometimes the smallest, most unexpected acts of connection are enough to pull you back from the edge. 

The film doesn’t offer a triumphal conclusion because it knows that life rarely does. Billy and the parrot sit side by side on the seafront, silent beneath the flicker of neon lights. The pain remains, the town unchanged—but there’s something in the quiet companionship that suggests the possibility of continuing. "Blackpool," with all its contradictions and imperfections, mirrors life itself: messy, unkind, sometimes ridiculous—but occasionally, worth sticking around for.