5. Style and Tone
Southcliffe is not just a quiet suburban market town - a darkness lies underneath the belly of the beast, obscured by a pretense normality. But the surface is masked in an art-house glaze which takes the mundane and manipulates it into something almost beautiful, despite being dim. Shot in HD, every emotion, every excruciating expression is captured as art admits the washed grey filter of the towns dusk, draining it of any warmth, symbolic or otherwise. The melancholy tone is a tribute to loss, emphasised by the lingering camera shots and cold, sparse dialogue. Southcliffe elected to use a nonlinear narrative structure without any notion or initial indication of time change. Okay, we are all used to films with nonlinear narratives, from Citizen Kane to Pulp Fiction, from City of God to La Dolce Vita and Annie Hall to Memento, but nothing upon television recently draws so much from employing this style of narration. It allows a fluidity to thread the stories temporal diversity and allow the audience to gather various strands of information that are vital to understand the characters psyche and emotional states and engage with the story. Sound is used hauntingly throughout Southcliffe, only used diegetically to emphasise the silences which lie throughout the series and by using only diegetic music emotion, too, is focused upon as the track emits that which the character feels. Durkin employs these techniques to distinguish itself from the stereotypical 9pm show on channel 4.