[Film Review] Lola (2022)

In the modern age of full-colour 4K footage and rampant CGI, it’s rare to see a feature released entirely in black-and-white. For director Andrew Legge’s LOLA, greyscale goes well beyond a mere stylistic choice, and is integral to the narrative and visual success of the film. 

Set in the depths of World War II-ravaged England, scientist sisters Thomasina ‘Thom’ (Emma Appleton) and Martha ‘Mars’ Hanbury (Stefanie Martini) develop the titular LOLA: a complex machine capable of intercepting broadcasts from the future. While initially used for their own amusement to enjoy the media and worldly advancements of humanity beyond their time, the increasing casualties of war urge the siblings to publicise reports of future German attacks in an attempt to prevent loss of life in the Blitz.

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Framed as found footage, the vast majority of the film is canonically shot by Martha, with the camera in many of these scenes actually operated by Martini, Legge, and the other actors themselves using vintage lenses and a period-accurate 16mm Bolex film camera. This dedication to authenticity, even down to lighting the primary environments of the sisters’ house naturally, is what makes the home video elements so uniquely believable, spliced together with similarly-accurately shot newsreels and genuine archive footage. However, Martini’s emotive, impassioned narration of events is what truly solidifies this story. Though Appleton’s performance as Thomasina is arguably more engaging and enigmatic as the bolder of the two sisters, Martha’s account of their experiences forms the backbone of the plot, and the cohesion her personal testimony offers allows the film to boldly stand out from the rest of the piecemeal found-footage genre.

LOLA does otherwise follow a few more conventional paths, but cleverly uses these familiar story beats to instil tension in the viewer. Pursued by British military intelligence after LOLA’s impossible predictions save numerous lives, Martha becomes romantically entwined with live-in liaison Lieutenant Sebastien Holloway (Rory Fleck Byrne); meanwhile, Thomasina is increasingly drawn into the murky world of military war games and sacrifice as they use LOLA to turn the tide of the war. Any purveyor of time travel fiction will quickly guess the dark, twisted path these choices have set the sisters and the world on, and while LOLA isn’t exactly a horror film, the dread and dismay felt as they hurtle ironically unknowingly towards their doom more than measures up to one.

Music is cleverly deployed to emphasise this atmosphere throughout the film, with a score from The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon. Having shot his previous short films with little-to-no dialogue, Legge wanted music to similarly drive LOLA’s narrative, and the popular music included in the soundtrack appropriately defines the main characters and the world they inhabit. The sisters are preternaturally early fans of David Bowie thanks to LOLA, even sporting nicknames that seem to be nods to two of the singer’s biggest hits, Space Oddity and Life On Mars, the former of which is featured in the film.

This access to such musical subcultures forms the basis of their far more modern sensibilities, as well as providing the frame of reference for their interventions’ impact: when Martha discovers Bowie’s music has disappeared from future broadcasts, it signals the shift from our reality into their new, horrifying one. Original compositions by Hannon that echo the sound of the sixties, but whose lyrics describe the new world order under the oppression of the Third Reich, arguably embody a culture born of a reality where the allies lost the war better than many other attempts in cinema.

This latter half of the film, which is defined by themes of death, persecution, and rebellion, nonetheless remains small-scale. What began as an amateur documentation of the sisters’ lives and happy successes becomes a series of short, fraught clips infused with danger as Martha secretly endeavours to capture the deeply personal realities of her life in hiding from the Nazi authorities. Thom is scarcely seen through snatches of news broadcasts, with she and LOLA forced into partnership with the new regime, but her impact is keenly felt all the same as a more reserved Emma Appleton makes the most of her limited screen time. Despite this dark tone, a few sweet scenes where Martha teaches a young boy whose family she and Sebastien are living with to operate her camera provide a rare sense of hope, and lean into the film’s examination of cinema as an art form, and as a force for good. 

Having seen firsthand the destruction LOLA, an invention that primarily allowed them to experience the joys of media, has wrought, Martha nonetheless uses cinema itself as a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save the world. Hoping a future broadcast of her film, the very same film we in the audience are watching, will be picked up by her sister on LOLA in the past and lead to the prevention of such a timeline, the true meaning behind LOLA as a film both within and without it’s own narrative brings us full circle. It’s all a bit ‘wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey’, but Legge manages to handle the meta cinema slant commendably, producing a genuinely enjoyable film that centres the power of the medium in the process.

LOLA, niche and visually unprepossessing to the modern eye as it is, certainly won’t be for everybody. However, it successfully proves to be a triumph of harmony between style and substance that will certainly stay with the right audience well into the future.

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