Edge of Summer: Lucy Cohen on her dreamy Cornish holiday coming-of-age drama

Cinema is not short of stories about “that one summer that changed everything”, but Edge of Summer, the debut fiction film from Lucy Cohen, stands out from the pack in the way it weaves myth and reality to tell a dreamy tale exploring the liminal space between childhood and adulthood.

The film centres on Evie (Flora Hylton), a quiet 11-year-old who arrives in Cornwall sometime in the early 90s excited for a holiday with her mum, Yvonne (Josie Walker), only to find herself playing third wheel when Tony (Steffan Rhodri) joins them. Yvonne describes Tony as a “family friend”, but Evie doesn’t seem convinced. She soon finds her own holiday entertainment, however, when she befriends Adam (Joel Sefton-Iongi ), a soulful local lad her own age. Together the pair explore a decommissioned tin mine on the edge of town, but in the dark of this forgotten place they find more than they bargained for. 

Cohen is best known for her thorny, multilayered documentary Kingdom of Us (2017), which follows a mother and her seven children as they attempt to process the shock and pain of their father’s suicide. Like Kingdom of Us, Edge of Summer is concerned with children growing up fast in the wake of grief, but Cohen also deploys moments of magic realism that calls to mind films like Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher (1999) and Céline Sciamma’s Petite maman (2021). Ahead of the film’s world premiere at Glasgow Film Festival, Cohen discusses her move to fiction filmmaking, her continued interest in children on the cusp of adulthood and the Cornish folk tales that inspired the film. 

You’ve worked for over 15 years in documentary. Why did you want to make the move to fiction filmmaking?

I certainly don’t rule out going back to documentaries. To me, it’s just storytelling. There are lots of similarities between the two, and I think documentary is a great training ground for fiction because they’re both all about observational detail and authenticity. With this film, I guess I wanted to be more front-footed in terms of crafting the story and characters. You’re also writing when you’re making documentaries, of course; you’re always shaping, you’re always crafting. But I wanted to be the author a bit more here.

I like the way you weave in the Cornish mining myth of The Knockers, these mischievous creatures who live in mines, into the story. Where did that idea spring from?

Like Evie, I used to visit Cornwall when I was a child. It’s amazing landscape down there. You feel this sense it’s groaning with history and memories. It’s the land of myths and legends, and because there is so much mythology and folklore in Cornwall, it’s a place where adults often believe in these stories, as well as children. 

I love the story of The Knockers, these creatures who knock on the walls of the mine as a warning that it’s going to collapse. People clearly created these stories to give themselves comfort; you’re in a perilous industry, and you’re there in the dark, and it’s comforting that maybe something is looking out for you.

I also felt that there were elements of The Knockers’ myth that echoed what was going on with Evie and Adam, in terms of fear and protection, and the world falling down around them.

The film looks to be set roughly in the early 90s, but you never specify the exact time period. Why did you choose to keep this hazy?

The early 90s was when I was the age of Evie and Adam, but I also wanted to take the audience back to their own childhood, so there’s an element of gentle nostalgia without it being too specific. I wanted to evoke a sense of being young again, and of memories of summer holidays that were completely pre-digital, where you had to go off and make your own fun. Children had their secret lives and adults had their secret lives. 

Often while writing, I would think about the older Evie looking back at this time, so I wanted to give it that feeling of a memory – but feeling like you’re inside that memory, as opposed to looking back at young people, giving them a pat on the head, rolling your eyes. I wanted us to be there with them in that complicated time.

This nostalgia is deeply evoked in the look of the film. Can you talk about your collaboration with cinematographer Rachel Clark to create that feeling?

One of our biggest challenges was moving between realism and then more surreal moments, the space of the mind and the imagination. What helped with that was staying within the kids’ perspective. You get this sense of a dreamlike state, almost, which I think has a woozy texture to it as well. But all departments worked together to create that feeling. In costumes, for example, Oliver [Cronk], the designer, started Evie in quite bright colours, and then it moved to colours that are softer, more muted and slightly darker. I always pictured the film as having the feeling of a faded photo or postcard.

There has been an extraordinary run of debuts recently from women filmmakers exploring similar periods of girlhood. I’m thinking of Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (2022), Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper (2023) and Adura Onashile’s Girl (2023) to name a few. Do you have any inkling why that is?

I can only speak for myself, but when I wanted to make my debut film I had to ask myself, where to begin? People always say, “Write what you know,” but I think in this story I was also writing what I didn’t know. I always felt in myself that there was this 11-year-old girl that I didn’t really understand. I felt that I couldn’t reach her, and there was something unreconciled about that time of my life.

You just have so many big feelings at this age. It’s a point where your understanding of the world shifts, and there’s so much drama in that moment, in that tension between who you were and who you’re going to become. It’s a world that’s interesting to explore, be it autobiographical or otherwise. I would guess that those directors, like me, wanted to dive into that. 

Edge of Summer, backed by the BFI Filmmaking Fund with National Lottery money, screens at the Glasgow Film Festival.