At the beginning of 7 Keys, single mother Lena (Emma McDonald) recounts in voiceover the story of a diminutive homeless woman who hid away for an entire year undetected in the closet of someone else’s apartment in Japan. “All I could think,” Lena comments, “was what if no-one ever found me, if I was so small, so lost that no-one really knew if I was there. Or not.”
This might make writer/director Joy Wilkinson’s feature debut sound as though it is going, like Dominic Bridges’ similarly London-set Freehold (aka Two Pigeons, 2017), to be concerned with phrogging, but even if illegal entry certainly features, the film’s focus is more on urban alienation and the desperate need for connection in an unforgiving city.
That quest for connection starts with dating, as both Lena and Daniel (Billy Postlethwaite) find themselves separately stood up by their respective online matches while sitting at adjacent restaurant tables. “Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?” Daniel observes, “Two people in the same place on the same night.” Lena, however, points out that it is not so unlikely in “a big city full of arseholes who only think about themselves”. In a sense, that is what 7 Keys traces through its drama: not just sex in the city, but loneliness too, in this vast, indifferent metropolis.
United in rejection, these two strangers decide they may as well seize the opportunity to dine together and share their sorrows. While both tell the kinds of little white lies about themselves that they imagine will show them to best advantage, sparks fly, and despite the reserved Daniel’s insistence on taking things slowly, Lena follows him – stalks him, really – back to his nearby apartment, and learning that he has held onto a collection of keys to all the places where he has lived before over the years, she proposes they spend the weekend sneaking into each and every one of them, in part for the thrill of a shared illicit activity, in part so she can get to know Daniel through his history as a lodger and tenant across London.
As they go from place to place, sneaking in and using the spaces as their own intimate abodes, these two lovers also gradually open up about their damaged pasts, their present situations, and their difficulty in settling down and making a home – while the range of apartments and houses that they visit show different socioeconomic models of London life, in what becomes a sort of city symphony by postcode. Yet as Lena works out that Daniel has lived with a different woman in each of those locations, and wonders aloud if he has been engaging in ‘serial monogamy’ as a neat solution to his own homelessness, other secrets will out, leaving Lena wondering if it might be too late to decouple herself from this dangerous trip down memory lane towards Daniel’s childhood home and primal scene.
“This city – it traps you. It sucks you in and then there’s no escape. There’s all these rooms and flats and tiny corners that you carve out and cling onto to make you feel like you have a stake, that you matter, but the truth is, no one really gives a fuck if you’re there or not.” These words, delivered by Daniel some way into 7 Keys, form an obvious echo with the sentiments expressed by Lena at the start of the film, suggesting that the two are kindred (lost) souls on parallel quests for love, family and security. Yet they are also very different, and the tensions between them prove to be not merely sexual, as their romantic, somewhat criminal escapade ever so gradually transforms into a taut, violent thriller. For it finds coordinates on the capital’s map where the sensibilities of Raine Allen-Miller’s Rye Lane (2023) cross paths with Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) and even Gerard Johnson’s Tony (2009), creating a vertiginous topography of genres.
In other words, this is a richly messy film, as diverse and contradictory as the city itself, with its stylised lighting scheme radically altering to match the ever-shifting mood – and even as 7 Keys offers social commentary on the metropolis’s more marginalised, even invisible residents who make easy prey for those with exploitative inclinations, it also maintains a disarming sympathy for the devil. No matter how overcrowded the market in London-focused cinema might now seem, there is still plenty of room to accommodate emerging talent like Wilkinson’s, even if one suspects she is going places.
7 Keys had its UK première at FrightFest 2024, 24 Aug
