Mark Kermode on… British director Carol Morley, who sees the surreal in the real

This time last year, British film-maker Carol Morley was tirelessly touring the independent cinemas of the UK, promoting her new film, Typist Artist Pirate King, one venue at a time. A quixotic account of an imagined road-trip between maverick British artist Audrey Amiss and former psychiatric nurse Sandra Panza (played respectively by Monica Dolan and Kelly Macdonald), it mixes tragi-comic fable with factual biography, and takes its title from Amiss’s own real-life passport description of her occupation. Like its subject, the film is alternately entertaining, inspiring and exasperating. But seeing Morley doing one packed audience Q&A after another – in which she described how a Wellcome screenwriting fellowship had led her to a vast cache of Amiss’s writings, drawings, paintings and collages – was a heady experience. As I told Morley after one particularly well-received event: “You should basically just accompany every screening of the film for ever.”

Now, Typist Artist Pirate King is on Netflix and finding an audience all on its own. Hopefully, its presence on the platform will lead viewers to seek out the back catalogue of one of our most thrillingly inventive and exciting film-makers, whose work includes an eye-openingly frank TV documentary, a brilliant big-screen docudrama, an acclaimed haunting British mystery, and an overlooked American neo-noir ripe for reappraisal.

Morley first made a splash in 2000 with The Alcohol Years (BFIPlayer), a TV documentary in which she returned to her home city of Manchester where, as a teenager, she had spent several years in an obliterated daze. Having placed a local newspaper ad that read “Carol Morley film project. Please contact me if you knew me between 1982-1987”, the film-maker conducted a series of jaw-droppingly frank interviews, building a no-holds-barred collage of a person she sometimes barely remembers. It’s an astonishing work: revelatory, confessional, confrontational, and at times utterly horrifying.

The Alcohol Years showed real cinematic promise – promise that would bear fruit a decade later in the equally powerful Dreams of a Life (2011). A heartbreaking blend of drama and documentary, it traced the life and death of Joyce Vincent, a vibrant young woman who died and lay undiscovered in her flat for years after slipping through the cracks in an increasingly alienated, isolated society. Mixing interviews with audiotape recordings of Vincent (a powerful singer) and eyes-half-closed dramatic reconstructions, Dreams of a Life is a profoundly humanist work that uses cinematic invention to bring us closer to awful reality. It is the work of an artist who instinctively understands the magic of the movies, and appreciates cinema’s empathetic ability to draw us into the worlds of others.

Carol Morley in a scene from The Alcohol Years. Photograph: Courtesy of CAMP

Crucially, as with The Alcohol Years, Dreams of a Life (which plays like a down-to-earth ghost story) never feels preachy; rather, it inhabits that strange netherworld on the edge of wakefulness in which reality and invention are in conversation. That same sense of dreaminess flows through The Falling (2014), Morley’s award-winning, spine-tingling tale of secrets, shared rapture and swooning sickness. Set in an English girls’ school in 1969, where an outbreak of apparently hysterical communal collapse follows a traumatic loss, The Falling built on Morley’s 2006 short film The Madness of the Dance, which dealt with “mass psychogenic illness”. Florence Pugh makes her screen debut alongside established star Maisie Williams, with Morley citing Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Lindsay Anderson’s If… as tonal touchstones. Meanwhile, an evocative score by Tracey Thorn adds a touch of homemade Wicker Man weirdness as the Alternative School Orchestra provide an onscreen link between the worlds of the real and the imagined.

All of which brings us to Out of Blue, Morley’s least appreciated film, which is also my favourite. As with The Falling, this is another dreamy drama with a gorgeous score, Clint Mansell’s ambient music adding oceans of depth to the New Orleans-set cosmic murder mystery. Morley’s most ambitious and visually expansive film, Out of Blue significantly centres on a recovering alcoholic (perfectly played by Patricia Clarkson, alongside the starry likes of James Caan and Jacki Weaver) with no memory of her childhood, who seems to be teetering on the brink of some awful realisation – a tangential return to the very personal themes of The Alcohol Years.

Loosely adapted from Martin Amis’s 1997 source Night Train (which was originally earmarked for adaptation by Nic Roeg, whose son, Luc, co-produces), Out of Blue has been described by Morley as an attempt to “rescue the characters from the pages” of the book – another tantalisingly autobiographical detail. Double-lives and dual realities interweave in a film rich with Twin Peaks-y surrealism – an adventurous spirit that alienated many critics, just as David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me baffled reviewers back in 1992.

Today Fire Walk With Me is considered a misunderstood masterpiece, one of its director’s finest works. One day soon, I believe the same will be true of Morley’s Out of Blue.

All titles in bold are widely available to stream unless otherwise specified

What else I’m enjoying

The Coming Storm
Gabriel Gatehouse’s dive into America’s conspiracy culture returns in a new Radio 4 series, offering a pre-election reminder of just how crazy the US has become and how deep the poisonous post-truth malaise runs. The presentation style is breezily inquisitive, but the subject matter remains alarming.

‘My favourite film of the year so far’: Demi Moore in The Substance. Photograph: Mubi/AP

The Substance
Coralie Fargeat’s eye-popping social satire is a rip-roaring treat, an exuberant feast of scrungy body-horror that splatters its audience with metaphors made flesh. Reports of audience walkouts merely add to the appeal – this is extreme cinema at its finest, designed to astonish and outrage in equal measure. My favourite film of the year so far.