In this deeply bleak documentary, director Clio Barnard looks to explore the life, works and impact of Andrea Dunbar, a British playwright known for shining a light on and giving voice to the impoverished and hardened people of Bradford, England.

Andrea Dunbar was just 15 when she wrote her first play, The Arbor, for a class assignment. Three years later, she was a single mom with a show at the Royal Court Theater in London, drawing notice for a relentless and raw look at her own life, telling the story of a girl from a tough part of town who falls for a seemingly sweet Pakistani man despite the racism of her environment. But things turn from bad to worse when her unintended pregnancy exposes her to the vitriol of her abusive father and the dark side of her lover. In real-life, this short-lived love affair resulted in Dunbar’s first-born, Lorraine, a girl who felt rejected by her neighborhood and mother because her Pakistani heritage. Dunbar later wrote Rita, Sue and Bob Too, a play that proved so successful that she was asked to adapt the screenplay. Dunbar went on to have two more kids by two different men, and continued writing while sliding deeper and deeper into alcoholism. Ultimately, she died in her local bar at age 29, leaving behind a gruesome legacy. Her daughters, Lorraine and Lisa, reveal horrifying tales of abuse and neglect, and before long it seems like Dunbar’s eldest is living out an unwritten Dunbar play. Lorraine Dunbar, who once overheard her mother wish she’d aborted her, grew up on the same tough streets, falling to hard drugs where her mother fell to alcohol. She too had three children, but with her mounting drug addiction, they’d each been taken away. As Lorraine’s story develops, The Arbor shifts from the life of Andrea to the tragedy of Lorraine. In some twisted way, it seems Lorraine’s life is the final work of the lower class playwright known for her gutsy tales of abuse and addiction. It’s a story that’s heart breaking on paper, but with Barnard’s bizarre execution, it becomes something else – something strange.

Rather than relying on archival footage and typical talking head interviews, Barnard crafts an avant-garde effort, having actors to lip-sync their performances to audio of interviews with Dunbar’s family and friends. (The lip-syncing technique is proudly announced in the film’s opening titles, which draws attention to each slip in the sync, making for a repeatedly jarring experience.) These “interviews” are then intercut with scenes from Dunbar’s heavily autobiographical first play performed on the street that inspired it. The result of these art house antics is so unsettling that it ultimately disconnected me from the narrative’s emotional resonance.

Re-enactments are commonplace in documentaries, and as such rarely draw attention to themselves, serving to fill in the gaps of what an interviewed person is detailing. What Barnard is attempting is more surreal, mimicking a play inspired by Dunbar’s work that was crafted from transcripts of Arbor residents, including the grown Lorraine. It’s interesting in concept, but in execution Barnard’s style is so strange I felt it hard to empathize to her characters. Watching actors – who you know to be actors – performing within the constraints of having to emote while matching the verbal stumbles and delivery of a spontaneous statement is deeply distracting. It adds a new (and hard to overcome) challenge to the suspension of disbelief required to sink into a film effectively. With the trend of meta docs, it’s becoming harder and harder to take what you see onscreen as truth. So what do you do when you’re told at the fore that this is already a step back from reality? The device leaves its audience in this odd space between narrative and documentary film, leading me to wonder: Why not give the actors the transcripts, and allow them perform without the shackles of lip-syncing to the recordings? Or why not let the audio speak for itself? It’s not as if this visual style added to the storytelling. If anything it seemed a departure from Dunbar’s aesthetic. Her writing was known for its gritty reality, something that this dreamlike documentary about the downtrodden never achieves. With its artifice so apparent, it was impossible to settle into the world of Bradford and attempt to empathize with its haunted and harrowed residents. And as the offputting visuals roughly tugged me away from the startling reality that is the Dunbar’s lives, I began to wish their story hadn’t been marred by these failing theatrics, and to wish that The Arbor had been a radio show instead.

The Arbor opens in NYC April 27, at The Film Forum, where Rita, Sue and Bob Too will also be showing.

Grade: D

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