Breaking the cringeometer in its first five minutes, Access All Areas opens with an excruciatingly fake show of teens behaving badly, as a group of Bristol kids illegally rave at a lido in broad daylight; the scene has all the unbelievability and wholesomeness of a deodorant advert.
Ella Purnell is Mia, a standard-issue troubled teenager (spot the telltale black eyeliner), whose childhood friend is sensitive soul Heath (Edward Bluemel), a budding guitarist. The movie picks up when the two of them, along with a couple of mates, head to a music festival without tickets on a Yolo (you only live once) mission to watch a reclusive musician rumoured to be performing live for the first time in years.
The cast struggles with the soap-opera-clunky dialogue, but by the end I was won over by their charm and the energy of the festival scenes – shot at Bestival in 2015. There’s a spot-on moment when Mia gatecrashes the VIP area, expecting all manner of debauchery, but instead finds a draggle of badly dressed middle-aged music industry snores drinking herbal tea. But this Hollyoaks-ish caper is let down by false notes and suffers from monumental lapses in festival reality: the characters are constantly running into each other by the beer tent and their smartphone batteries never run out.
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