Misper screens live and virtually at Chattanooga Film Festival, 19 June 2026
In a fictive coastal town named ‘Southdowne’ in the real South Downs (but in fact shot in Folkestone), there is a grand old-world hotel – indeed called ‘the Grand’ – that is half-shrouded in scaffolding and has seen better days. It boasts an impressive view over the Channel, and its manager Gary Jenkins (Daniel Ryan) claims, rather absurdly, that on a clear day you can see all the way to Paris. Yet young, reserved Leonard Lowry (Samuel Blenkin), who both works and resides in the hotel, has eyes only for his 25-year-old colleague Elle Pritchard (Emily Carey), even if he has not, in two years of being at close quarters with her, quite built up the courage to tell her how he feels. So Harry Sherriff’s debut feature Misper, which he co-wrote with Laurence Tratalos, starts off a little like a British sit-com, pitched somewhere between the English seaside hospitality of Fawlty Towers and the staff shenanigans of The Office (complete with a will-they-won’t-they work romance and a ridiculous manager).
Yet there are hints of a different, darker genre lurking in the shadows. “I felt like I was in The Shining,” Gary reads aloud, in self-flagellating despair, from a vicious online customer review of the hotel, leading Leonard to console his boss with the only positive spin that he can put on the critique: “That’s a good film.” Yet soon Leonard too will feel, as he tells a therapist (Livvie May) over the phone, that he himself is “living in a horror movie.” For one evening his beloved Elle will leave the hotel after work, and then fail to return the following morning. As the days turn into weeks, Elle is, at least at first, the ‘misper’ of the title – a blend word, used by the police, for ‘missing person’ – but Leonard himself will also become a missing person, receding into his grief and guilt.
As someone who struggles to express his emotions at the best of times, Leonard is left stewing in his own nightmares, paranoia and insomnia, stuck with all the things that he wished had not gone unsaid. The other staff members of this hotel ‘family’ – Viv (Rosalind Adler), Khalid (Sunil Paterl) and especially Pam (Christine Bottomley) – similarly suffer with Elle’s absence and with their own largely unspoken loss, even as Gary mourns separately, but in parallel, for the collapse of the business that he has made his life. Here, change happens, ends come, and as Roy Orbison sings in the song that plays over the closing credits, love hurts.
Mooted within the film is a locally shot ‘true crime’ TV series – but Misper itself is the very opposite of that show. For it is understated and unsensational, showing little interest in the details of Elle’s experiences, and instead exploring their emotional blast radius – the mourning father (Oliver Ryan) who finds himself under suspicion, the co-worker anxious that she failed to step in when she could have, and Leonard – lost and confused – taking his first bracing dip in the sea of mortality, even if, on his gradual path to recovery, he must learn to take the shit with the healing water. Sherriff has crafted a sensitive, painfully funny and deeply affecting psychodrama about the always incomplete process of letting go and moving on, set both in an establishment (under constant refurbishment) where people come and go and sometimes return without ever staying long, and at a shoreline where the mundane meets the infinite.
strap: Harry Sherriff’s tragicomic debut feature shows a young seaside hotel worker quietly drowning in waves of grief and loss
© Anton Bitel
