Plot
In the Welsh seaside city of Swansea, Oliver Tate is an eccentric, unpopular 15-year-old who is infatuated with his mischievous classmate, Jordana Bevan. After Oliver bullies another female classmate to impress Jordana, she invites him to meet secretly after school and takes pictures of them kissing. Jordana uses the pictures to make her ex-boyfriend Mark jealous, resulting in Oliver being beaten up by Mark at school for refusing to call Jordana a "slut". Jordana becomes Oliver's girlfriend and, after a couple of weeks, they lose their virginity to each other in his bedroom while his parents are out.
Oliver begins to suspect that his mother Jill is having an affair with an old flame, New Age motivational speaker Graham Purvis, who has moved in next door with his girlfriend Kim-Lin. Worried about his parents' marriage, he monitors their sex life by charting the dimmer switch in their bedroom, concluding that they have not had sex for seven months. After spotting Jill in town with Graham and overhearing her talk about him on the phone, Oliver tries to warn his depressed father Lloyd, who dismisses his suspicions. Oliver spies on Jill attending one of Graham's seminars, where Graham tells her that he has broken up with Kim-Lin.
As Oliver's relationship with Jordana grows, she reveals that her mother has been diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumour. At an awkward early Christmas dinner at Jordana's house, he is welcomed by her parents but witnesses her father break down. Despite agreeing to visit Jordana's mother at the hospital the day of her operation, Oliver loses his nerve and temporarily cuts off contact with her so he can focus on salvaging his parents' marriage, planning to resume his relationship with Jordana afterwards.
On the night of New Year's Eve, Jill goes to the beach with Graham. While searching for Jill on the crowded beach, Oliver is stunned to see Jordana with another boy. He then spies on his mother getting into the back of Graham's van and assumes the worst. Enraged, he goes home and takes several of Lloyd's antidepressants before breaking into Graham's house, where he gets drunk and commits minor acts of vandalism. Returning home, Graham drops an intoxicated Oliver on his doorstep and leaves. The next morning, Oliver awakes to see that his parents are not angry with him and are reconciling, though Jill admits that she gave Graham a handjob.
Jordana breaks up with Oliver via a letter informing him that she is seeing someone else and that her mother's operation was successful; he becomes depressed over the next few months. At school, Oliver apologises to Jordana for not visiting her mother at the hospital, hoping she will leave her new boyfriend for him, but she rejects him. Oliver later encounters Jordana on the beach at sunset, learning that she does not actually have a new boyfriend. She declares that Oliver was horrible to her, and he admits that he made a mistake. Together, they walk several inches deep into the sea, smiling at each other.
Critical reception
Submarine received positive reviews from critics. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 88% based on 156 reviews, with an average rating of 7.4/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Funny, stylish, and ringing with adolescent truth, Submarine marks Richard Ayoade as a talent to watch." [14] On Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 76 based on 37 reviews, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. [15]
Critic Roger Ebert gave the film 3 out of 4, saying, "Submarine isn't an insipid teen sex comedy. It flaunts some stylistic devices, such as titles and sections and self-aware narration, but it doesn't try too hard to be desperately clever. It's a self-confident work for the first-time director, Richard Ayoade, whose purpose I think is to capture that delicate moment in some adolescent lives when idealism and trust lead to tentative experiments. Because Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige are enormously likable in their roles, they win our sympathy and make us realize that too many movies about younger teenagers are filtered through the sensibility of more weathered minds." [16]
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