Evening Standard, 16 July 1992, by Alexander Walker.
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<snip>

"DAKOTA ROAD" (National Film Theatre, 88 mins), writer-
director Nick Ward's first feature film, profits from Ian 
Wilson's scoured, bleak but radiantly beautiful photography 
of East Anglia's Fenland. But the rest of it is hard going. 

A film about everyone's 'secret desires', it shows a cluster 
of joyless people luxuriating in their glumness as only 
actors in an English film can. The orphaned boy in the 
signal box fumbles with the 15-year-old sexpot who's lusting 
vainly after the men at the American air base. She, in turn, 
is the target of her inadequate dad. His put-upon wife 
scrubs floors for the bereaved landlord in the big house 
while he lubriciously eyes her kneeling haunches. And the 
local reverend snoops around the parish trying to seduce the 
young signalman. 

Fornication, incest and the predictable suicide: this East 
Anglian la ronde makes the events at "Cold Comfort Farm" 
look like the product of global warming. On stage, all of it 
just might pull together. On the screen's greater realism, 
conducted throughout in tones of strangulated 
inarticulateness with each line eventually extruded from the 
lips of the cast with apocalyptic intensity, the result is 
overwhelming embarrassment. 

Only the oldest inhabitant (Liz Smith as a batty granny) and 
the youngest (Rachel Scott as the sexpot's kid sister) 
escape the dead touch of the British art film. 



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