The Polar Boy

The other reviewers have written about the film's merits. There was however one aspect of the movie that was so poorly realised that I found it very difficult to sit through the film. Sound design is incredibly important in film-making and often undervalued. However, in 'The Polar Boy', it seems that the sound team are shouting at you to pay attention to their work. The volume of white noise, traffic and bird sounds are ramped up so high that they overwhelm most scenes. All I could notice was how loud all the background noise was and it took me right out of the movie. This may have been a decision on the part of the director and post production team to give the film a documentary style feel but it has unfortunately ruined the movie.

In real life the human ear filters out white noise. Maybe the film makers thought the over amplified background noise would give the film a heightened sense of reality, maybe it was meant to create unease in the audience. However, what it achieves is to make the audience very aware they are watching a film rather than engaging in it.