Carol Morley has spent her career excavating the hidden lives of women — the disappeared, the overlooked, the ones who fell through the cracks of official narrative. Here she turns that same forensic attention on herself, and the result is the most emotionally precise film she's made. 7 Miles Out adapts her autobiographical novel into something that breathes like memory: non-linear, tender, occasionally absurd, and shot through with a grief that never announces itself. The film's architecture is a triptych — childhood, girlhood, youth — and Morley keeps each register distinct without making the transitions feel mechanical. Lucy Halliday's teenage Ann carries the weight of the piece, charm and confusion in roughly equal measure, while Amelie Hughes as young Ann supplies the film's most unguarded moments. The cassette-recorder radio presenter bit is precisely observed: that particular 1970s childhood game where you narrate your own life to an imaginary audience, rehearsing a self before you've grown into one. Aidan Gillen's Ronald is the film's ticking clock. Gillen plays dangerous discontent as a kind of radioactive stillness — suit-and-loosened-tie, armchair, cigarette, the performative patience of a man who has already decided something. When Ann interviews him about his new Manchester job with her cassette recorder, the scene is simultaneously funny and unbearable. Gemma Whelan's Bryn holds the domestic world together with wry competence until she can't, and Whelan makes the collapse feel earned rather than convenient. The Joy Division material is where the film finds its cultural argument. Morley isn't interested in the mythology of post-punk — she's interested in what it felt like to be a teenage girl trying to get inside that mythology, and how many supercilious men stood at the door. Jim English's Tony Wilson is pitch-perfect: charismatic, self-important, exactly the kind of person who gives a teenage girl her first croissant and considers the transaction complete. The line — 'I've shagged him; he gave me my first croissant' — lands with the surreal precision of something that could only be true. The film's bravest structural choice is what it does with suicide. There are three deaths in the film; only Ian Curtis's gets named plainly. The others — including Ann's father — are buried under shame and cover-up, treated as private catastrophes rather than public facts. Morley makes this pattern visible without editorialising about it, and it's the film's deepest formal intelligence: the things we don't say shape us as surely as the things we do. If the film has a weakness, it's in the London music promoter passage, where Claire Grogan's cameo arrives and departs a little quickly, and the final movement — Ann going away from the music, or through it, or past it — is deliberately unresolved in a way that feels true to experience but slightly unsatisfying as cinema. Morley earns the ambiguity; she just doesn't quite illuminate it. Still: this is Morley's most personal and most accessible film, and its tenderness is hard-won. The Terence Davies comparison the Guardian floats is apt in register if not quite in method — Davies works in pure sensation and long takes, Morley in accumulation and detail — but both filmmakers understand that the past doesn't pass, it reconfigures. 7 Miles Out knows exactly what it is: a love letter to a teenage self who survived without knowing how.
