Archipelago

2010

1 hr. 54 min.

Drama

List

96%

25 Reviews

Tomatometer

59%

1,000+ Ratings

Audience Score

A family's deep fractures begin to surface during a vacation on the Isles of Scilly.

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Critics Consensus

Sad, funny, and wise in equal measure, Archipelago finds writer-director Joanna Hogg in remarkably strong, confident form.

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Losk N

Tom hiddelston is so good actor

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

08/17/23

Full Review

Naomi L

Joanna Hogg and holidays... I don't know anybody else who captures the way tensions accurately appear in the English upper middle class, which I think is specifically unique to Britain. Superficial conventions of extreme politeness with a refusal to talk or to be able to talk about the real issue until the emotionally repressed explode into horrific, expletive-laden violence while this is stoically borne by the rest of the party and never brought up. It's unthinkable to anybody who hasn't witnessed this, recognisable to everybody else who has. "Unrelated" was another gem.

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

07/07/23

Full Review

diane

I'm a giant fan of all things Brit including movies but this one seemed to me like a bit of unrelenting tedium, albeit spotted with a few bursts of verbal rage. For instance we're staring at a still shot of some trees for . . . . about . . . . this . . . . long (or maybe longer) then we switch to a scene where something moves perhaps one of the characters and that lasts for an equally endless amount of time. At this point we're absolutely craving a bit of diaglogue . . . . wait . . . . for . . . . it . . . and voila, there it is, a handful of spoken words offered to the audience like a bone to a dog. Four stars because it's beautiful to look at - even the tediously long shots of stuff and because, well, it is after all British.

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

11/09/22

Full Review

isla s

This is a laidback film with little going on other than long discussions, in a very foreign holiday type setting. The surroundings do provide good cinematography/atmosphere certainly and its not unpleasant, its just a bit slow and it's not exactly exciting. There's a decent cast and it has a light and somewhat pleasant feel to it tonally but there's not much else I can say about it really...it focusses on middle to upper middle class people and features a number of conversations held between various characters in a, as I say, laidback setting - hardly action packed or gripping stuff but it's ok I suppose. I wouldn't specifically recommend this film as such, no.

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

03/31/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Unrequited love, hate, frustration in the most upper middle class thing ever as most of a family goto a Georgian house on the Isles of Scilly to not have an affair with the art teacher, the hired help or actually achieve very much at all. It's a great, staccato, internalised scream of a film; where everyone knows they aren't suffering in any normal definition of the term. They can't wait to leave to get on with life but already miss whatever that was when they are gone. Beautifully observed, written and performed.

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

02/12/23

Full Review

Audience Member

It's easy to see why Archipelago is such a Marmite film: the characters are upper middle-class and skirt often pretentiously around their self-absorbed and unexpressive frustrations while ignoring the feelings of (for instance) their live-in chalet girl. But Joanna Hogg's film is unusually hypnotic. The palette - like the Scilly Isles location - is all greys and windswept greens, there are few if any close-ups, no climaxes, and yet by the end all that is unsaid has been thoroughly articulated. A very interesting and deceptively simple work.

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

01/27/23

Full Review

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Joanna Hogg

Director

Christopher James Baker

Artist

Kate Fahy

Patricia

Tom Hiddleston

Edward

Lydia Leonard

Cynthia

Amy Lloyd

Rose

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Manohla Dargis

New York Times

In scene after scene, meaning sneaks in and sometimes roars.

Jun 26, 2014

Full Review

Leslie Felperin

Variety

This is a beautifully distilled and literally still work that lingers in the mind long after its conclusion.

Jun 23, 2014

Full Review

Jonathan Romney

Sight & Sound

As much as a downbeat comedy of bourgeois mores, Archipelago is a sort of claustrophobic horror story, set in a place of no easy escape.

Jun 18, 2012

Full Review

Alistair Lawrence

Common Sense Media

The second movie from British writer-director Joanna Hogg is a quiet study in family dynamics where repression and resentment scream silently in almost every scene.

Rated: 4/5

Apr 11, 2022

Full Review

Vladan Petkovic

Cineuropa

Indeed, the emotional inhibition of the English upper class is hardly new, but Hogg's understated handling of the subject is fresh and challenging.

Aug 12, 2020

Full Review

CJ Sheu

Review Film Review

It could be worse ... but it could also be better[.]

Jul 1, 2020

Full Review

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Synopsis

A family's deep fractures begin to surface during a vacation on the Isles of Scilly.

Director: Joanna Hogg
Executive Producer: Edward Charlton, Kiyoshi Nomura
Production Co: Wild Horses Film Company
Genre: Drama
Original Language: English
Release Date (Streaming): Nov 5, 2015

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