A One Mann’s Movies review of “7 Miles Out”. (From the 2026 London Film Festival). (2026, 4.5*, NR).
“Things change. Times change. And you can say this is where it all began”. So starts 7 Miles Out, this semi-biographical movie by Carol Morley, who should be being recognised as more of a national treasure than she is. (On a soon to be broadcast Movie Bread Club podcast, on which I was a guest, the crumby gang – I say this with the greatest love – hadn’t heard of Carol… I put them right, suggesting Out of Blue as a good film to start with.)
This film resonated with me in particular. Ann (aka Carol)’s Dad, Ronald Westbourne (Aidan Gillen), has unenthusiastically got a new job in the centre of Manchester. “7 Miles Out” refers to the distance between the job location and Stockport which is where they live. If you go another 14 Miles Out in that same direction, you reach Chapel-en-le-Frith, which is where I grew up. I used to regularly go on the train to Stockport and Manchester: my nearest big cities. Although it’s bad form to mention a lady’s age, I am just 5 years older than Carol. So many of the themes of the 70’s and 80’s were bang on the money for me.
One Mann’s Movies Rating:
Plot:
Ann (Amelie Hughes and then Lucy Halliday) struggles to come to terms with her beloved father’s suicide and finds escapism in the emerging new-wave punk movement in her home town of Stockport.
Certification:
UK: NR; US: NR. (This film has not yet received a classification by the BBFC, but I would expect it to be a 15 based on the suicide theme, sex and drug references.)
Talent:
Starring: Lucy Halliday, Aidan Gillen, Gemma Whelan, Amelie Hughes, Clare Grogan, Jean-Pascal Heynemand, Jessica McHale, Jim English, Kasper Hilton-Hille.
Directed by: Carol Morley.
Written by: Carol Morley.
Running Time: 2h 7m.
Review:
Positives:
- The sense of time and place for the film is excellent:
- I would probably have had to explain to the younger members in the audience WHY ON EARTH two kids in the playground were pretending to smoke cigarettes before shoving them fully in their mouths and eating them. But Sweet Cigarettes (candy) were something I used to readily buy at the newsagents so I could swagger around with one in my mouth ‘looking cool’. (Yes kids, it’s true).
- There’s also a reference to “Clunk Click Every Trip” when Ann and her Dad get into their gold.. no brown… no bronze, company car: quietly ignoring that it was ‘Sir Jimmy Crystal’, as it ‘appens, who did those adverts.
- Mum Bryn (Gemma Whelan) is exasperated that Dad (Aidan Gillen) is trying to look trendy by starting to wear flares… just as Ann’s cool brother Scott (Kasper Hilton-Hille) is “trying to look more like Dad” by wearing drainpipes.
- Everyone smokes.
- A ticket to see Joy Division in concert is £1.50.
- It is common for a dodgy guy in a dirty mac to flash young schoolgirls outside the school.
- Ann has a full zip-up cardigan with a big ring on the zip. (ibid!)
- The story is gripping and had me wondering quite how autobiographical the “semi-autobiographical” story was. Ann certainly has an adventurous life, filled with fun, a LOT of sex, but also drenched in heartbreak. Her final meeting with her Dad reminded me of the Doctor Who Season 4 episode “Turn Left”: a 50:50 decision with fateful consequences.
- Morley has taken her time to introduce us to the characters – a slow dance of Ronald and Bryn (to Nat King Cole perhaps?) shows the love between them and makes us feel the impact on Bryn all the more. With her brother driving his own journalistic career down in London, Ann is left to fend for herself and support her mother. Her only solace is her friend Helen (Daisy-Mai Foden and then Leila Entwistle). The pair come together in Junior School after Ann’s bereavement shows that her old friends were no friends at all. (Cue mean-girls being really really mean.) Helen is a similar outcast: “I’ve not got a Dad either: he’s not dead – he’s in Skegness”!
- The film then skips forwards – with the different actors – and we enter a world of booze, drugs and sex, where “going all the way” has consequences. Lucy Halliday (Blue Jean, California Schemin’) gives an excellent performance. The film really kicks into high-gear when they meet Dawn (Eve Baddeley): a teen with more financial means than them. (She lives in a house called ‘Sunnyside’: “YOUR HOUSE HAS A NAME! AND VERTICAL BLINDS”!) Dawn is the ticket – literally – to get them in to see Joy Division: a goal never quite achieved, but if the dancing sequence just outside the fire-exit doors doesn’t put a smile on your face nothing will!
- The soundtrack is great and features music by Carly Paradis and New Wave-style songs which I note from the end titles had “lyrics by Carol Morley”. So, I assume, these were the actual songs that Carol wrote with her friends as they were trying to break into the music scene.
Negatives:
- The pacing of the film, in its middle reel in particular, is a little uneven. It’s 127 minutes long and – for me – some tightening up of the edit would have enhanced it further. I guess, when it’s “your story” it must be particularly hard to take stuff out.
- I found some of the dialogue difficult to understand…. and I grew up there! I imagine an audience not tuned to the northern twang might struggle.
- Another one for my still unwritten book on bad movie sex: another bra that stays firmly in place! 😉
Query:
- There’s a scene where the girls are ejected from a club and the bouncer at the door is gesticulating at another woman saying “You’re banned and barred!”. The film only awards the briefest of glimpses, but was this Carol Morley in a cameo? It would be fun if so!
Triggers
Suicide forms a repeated motif in this story, which some viewers may find distressing.
Summary Thoughts:
I loved this. It pressed all my personal buttons of location, location, location as well as time-period, time-period, time-period! Carol Morley once again proves she can deliver a gripping story in a highly-entertaining way. As I publish this, the film is receiving its world-premiere at BFI Southbank’s, Screen NFT1, and I hope the public audience welcome it as warmly as our press audience did.
I note that Carol Morley has covered some of this territory before. Way back in 2000, she produced a BAFTA-nominated autobiographical documentary The Alcohol Years which explored her wild youth in Manchester by interviewing past friends and acquaintances. Having seen this film, I will have to see if I can dig this out and give it a watch as a companion piece. If the film comes out on Blu-Ray, this would be an excellent “added feature” to include on it.
I feel like “star inflation” is running away from me in this LFF as there are just SO many great films I’m seeing. (This is SUCH an exciting time for cinema.) Whilst not absolute perfection, 7 Miles Out really comes pretty damn close as a compulsive coming-of-age story. So it gets my (normally) rarely used 4.5 stars.
“I exist on the best terms I can. The past is now part of my future. The present is well out of hand”.
Where to watch?
Trailer:
A clip from the film is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ-D77XWF4s.
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