Clio Barnard has made a career of finding the philosophical inside the municipal. Her Birmingham, like the city itself, is layered: post-industrial, aspirational in patches, and quietly brutal to those it cannot absorb. I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, premiering in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, is her fourth fiction feature and her first adaptation, drawn from Keiran Goddard’s novel and shaped for the screen by playwright Enda Walsh. The result is a socially conscious ensemble drama about five lifelong friends arriving, blinking and slightly winded, at the threshold of their thirties.
Barnard’s earlier work, from the formally audacious The Arbor to the tender Ali & Ava, established her as a filmmaker whose politics live in the textures of daily life rather than in argument. This film is consistent with that instinct. It is warm and gritty, class-conscious without being preachy, and grounded in the kind of naturalistic performance that makes sociology feel like flesh. Its emotional weight accumulates gradually, the way a folk song does. You may not notice it has reached you until it already has.
A Quintet in Close-Up
Cinematographer Simon Tindall keeps his camera close. Expressively, uncomfortably close, in the tradition of filmmakers who believe that the human face, held long enough, becomes a landscape with its own topology. The five central performances reward this scrutiny.
Rian, played by Joe Cole with a brooding, carefully rationed reserve, is the one who escaped. He traded financial instruments online, made a fortune, and now occupies a glacial high-rise in Canary Wharf that looks less like a home than a holding cell with good views. Cole’s emotional inarticulacy is the performance’s defining feature: you sense the warmth Rian carries for his friends, and the glass panel he cannot stop placing between it and them.
Daryl McCormack, previously known for a rather different kind of heat, strips back the charisma to play Conor, a builder’s son turned construction firm owner. He is expectant father, hothead, and slow-motion disaster, his violence never far from the surface. McCormack makes the anger feel earned rather than decorative.
Anthony Boyle’s Patrick is the film’s most politically legible character: university-educated, gig economy-employed, and incandescent with frustrated intelligence. Boyle gives him a rawness that makes the speeches land as testimony rather than manifesto. He is, arguably, the emotional centre of gravity.
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Lola Petticrew’s Shiv, the group’s sole woman, is a homemaker by genuine choice rather than resignation, and Petticrew resists every invitation to make her a figure of quiet suffering. She radiates. Jay Lycurgo’s Oli, a good-natured heroin dealer who adopts a stray dog with the optimism of a man trying to save something, brings a sweetness that keeps the film from tipping into abjection.
The men’s platonic affection carries the particular credibility of performances built on mutual trust. Tindall’s mobile rig-mounted camera moves through these friendships like a sixth member of the group: familiar, unobtrusive, and always watching.
What the Towers Knew
The film’s title is sourced from a childhood memory shared by all five: the demolition of Birmingham’s brutalist council estate towers, those thunderous public spectacles that dressed up displacement as urban renewal. Oli recalls seeing Satan’s face in the dust cloud. He may not have been wrong.
The irony is structural. Rian and Conor are now investors in a new high-rise, the Dedalus building, named for Conor’s late father but resonant with the mythological architect who built the labyrinth and whose son, Icarus, flew too close to the sun. The film lets that symbolism breathe rather than underline it. Time-lapse footage of the tower rising from wasteland functions as a kind of visual chorus: progress, hubris, and the long shadow of capital.
Walsh’s screenplay handles the class architecture with genuine nuance. Those who stayed in Birmingham are poorer in pounds and richer in everything else: community, history, laughter, love. Rian’s wealth is presented as a kind of bereavement. He has more than he ever imagined and less of what he actually needed.
The film’s most didactic moments arrive via Patrick, who delivers a pair of impassioned speeches on landlordism, housing as a social right, and the systematic abandonment of the working class. The speeches are, technically, on the nose. They are also correct, and Boyle delivers them with the specificity of a man who has lived the argument rather than constructed it. The screenplay is at its finest, though, in the spaces between speeches: a glance held a beat too long, a gesture that substitutes for a confession, the things these characters know but cannot find the language to say.
The Slow Burn and the Shimmering Water
Barnard shoots in the real homes, clubs, and streets that shaped these characters, and the decision pays compound interest throughout. There is no gap between the world the film describes and the world it inhabits. This has always been her method: embed, collaborate, and trust that authenticity is its own kind of cinematography.
The soundtrack earns its place. The Streets’ Don’t Mug Yourself opens proceedings in a pub that fizzes with decades of shared history, and the curation that follows, from Bicep to The Proclaimers, is both pleasurably eclectic and thematically pointed. Harry Escott’s bass-heavy score provides the undertow.
The first act is dense, sometimes breathlessly so. Five characters, their orbits, their histories, their private griefs: the film administers a great deal of information before it allows the material to settle. This is the cost of the payoff. By the second half, when a late revelation rattles the foundations and a tragedy arrives with the weight of something that was always going to happen, the emotional impact is neither manufactured nor melodramatic.
One image crystallises the film’s romantic ambition: lights shimmering on dark water, a figure alone, trying to reach a decision. It is a shift in visual register, classical where the rest of the film is naturalistic, and it works precisely because it is earned. Barnard offers it as a gift to a character who has drifted beyond the reach of easy comfort.
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is a 2026 drama film directed by Clio Barnard and co-written with Enda Walsh, based on the novel of the same name by Keiran Goddard. The story follows five friends—Patrick, Shiv, Rian, Oli, and Conor—who grew up together but now, at the age of thirty, find that their lives have not materialized as they once imagined. As old secrets surface and personal struggles mount, the film explores the enduring power of friendship and the realities of place and circumstance. The movie had its world premiere on May 20, 2026, at the Directors’ Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival and is distributed by Curzon Film in the United Kingdom.
Full Credits
Title: I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
Distributor: Curzon Film
Release date: May 20, 2026
Rating: Not Rated
Running time: 109 minutes
Director: Clio Barnard
Writers: Clio Barnard, Enda Walsh
Producers and Executive Producers: Tracy O’Riordan, Clio Barnard, Enda Walsh, Keiran Goddard, Eva Yates, Claudia Yusef, Mia Bays, Ali Jazayeri, Keith Kehoe, Louisa Dent, Philip Knatchbull, Carole Baraton, Lucie Desquiens
Cast: Anthony Boyle, Joe Cole, Jay Lycurgo, Daryl McCormack, Lola Petticrew, Millie Brady, Lucie Shorthouse, James Eeles, Michael Horton
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Simon Tindall
Editors: Maya Maffioli
Composer: Harry Escott
The Review
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
Barnard's finest fiction feature to date. I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning trusts its audience to sit with discomfort, ambiguity, and the slow accumulation of feeling that defines real friendship and real loss. Walsh's screenplay occasionally stumbles into the didactic, and the first act asks for patience. What it gives back is considerable: five performances of genuine depth, a visual language rooted in place and community, and an emotional honesty that lingers well past the credits.
PROS
- Outstanding ensemble performances, particularly Boyle and Petticrew
- Barnard's authentic, community-embedded filmmaking
- Nuanced, unsentimental treatment of class and friendship
- Beautifully chosen soundtrack
- Emotional payoff feels genuinely earned
CONS
- Dense, breathless first act
- Patrick's speeches tip occasionally into speechifying
- Supporting characters (notably Conor's wife) underserved
