‘7 Keys’: SXSW Review

Dir/scr: Joy Wilkinson. UK. 2024. 93mins

A single mum let down by her Tinder date, Lena (Emma McDonald) strikes up a conversation with Daniel (Billy Postlethwaite), a fellow loner at a bar. The spark between them ignites when Lena learns that Daniel has kept the keys to all the places he has lived in London. She proposes a risky game – they use the keys to break into each apartment over a weekend of adrenaline-fuelled erotic adventures. The feature debut from screenwriter, playwright and former Screen Star of Tomorrow Joy Wilkinson, 7 Keys is a nervy but uneven thriller that is rather let down by the fact that, while the two central performances are independently strong, there’s little discernible chemistry between them.

A nervy but uneven thriller 

Wilkinson is clearly a talented writer – she co-wrote a play, Fried Eggs & Fag Ends, at the age of fourteen, and went on to win the Soho Theatre’s Verity Bargate Award. Two of her screenplays have been selected for the Brit List, and her television work includes the BBC’s Doctor Who and Lockwood & Co for Netflix. Which is why it is surprising that the screenplay of her feature directing debut feels like one of the weaker elements of the film.

It’s an intriguing premise, certainly, but one that seems a little contrived and over-stretched at feature length. And there are moments when the film sacrifices clarity and character consistency in service of the somewhat laboured central plot device. Still, Wilkinson fills the picture with an uneasy, incrementally building tension which could recommend 7 Keys to genre audiences at further festivals and perhaps through a streaming platform release.

In narration layered over colour-saturated shots of the London skyline, Lena tells a story about an old woman in Japan, who lived covertly and, for a while at least, undiscovered, in someone else’s home. While other people tend to sympathise with the owner of the apartment, she relates to the woman. “All I could think was, what if no one ever found me?” It’s a line that chimes with Lena’s actions later in the film. But placed at the very start of the movie, it rather misleadingly calls into question the opening scene which shows Lena in a grim, sparsely decorated box of a flat, watching helplessly as her son is led away. Is she squatting in the property? Has the child been taken into care by social services?

We later learn that the sad little apartment is her own, and the child is spending the weekend with his father, who has only recently acknowledged the boy as his son. But since Lena is by this point in the middle of a house-breaking spree, she is not necessarily the most trustworthy of witnesses. The picture is deliberately seeded with questions of credibility about both of the characters, who are confronted with uncomfortable truths during their quest for excitement.  It’s a technique that wrong-foots the audience, purposefully tipping us off balance. But it also makes it hard to get to grips with who they are as people or to feel invested in them when, inevitably, there are threats to the safety of one or both.

Trust, both in the characters and their actions, is a fundamental issue here. In particular, alarm bells sound over Lena’s decision to put her safety in the hands of a stranger in a series of random locations. It perhaps would seem more credible if the connection between the characters was tangible and electric, rather than the strained small talk and awkward body language that plays out on screen. And while neither character turns out to be who or what they initially seem, this doesn’t ultimately serve to make their actions any more believable.