Submarine: Aesthetic and Adolescent Imagination
Richard Ayoade and the World of Submarine
Submarine (2010) is a British coming-of-age film directed by Richard Ayoade, adapting Joe Dunthorne's 2008 novel. Shot in and around Swansea, it was produced by Warp Films and Film4 on a budget of approximately $1.5 million. Aesthetic is central to understanding the film: Ayoade crafts a very deliberate look — saturated colours, mannered framing and a self-conscious auteur sensibility that announces itself from the opening frames. Cinematographer Erik Wilson and editor Chris Dickens shaped that look in collaboration with Ayoade; the original songs and incidental music came from Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys, with orchestral score by Andrew Hewitt. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010 and became a cult indie success.
Director: Richard Ayoade. Cinematographer: Erik Wilson. Producer: Warp Films and Film4. Music: Alex Turner (songs) and Andrew Hewitt (score). Year: 2010. Country: UK.
The Saturated Palette and Its Meaning
The film’s most immediately recognisable quality is its saturated colour palette. Yellows, mustards and mid-blues dominate the coastal and domestic spaces of Swansea. This is not a naturalistic rendering of 1980s Wales; it is a heightened, remembered version of adolescence — colour filtered through a teenager’s imagination rather than documentary realism. The choice positions the spectator inside Oliver’s mind: we see the world as he wants it to look, romantic and slightly unreal.
In the opening credit-sequence beach montage, the camera lingers on wide coastal shots drenched in warm ochre light. The horizon line sits low in the frame, leaving sky and sea to fill most of the image; Oliver is a small, self-important figure in the foreground. This framing establishes the macro irony immediately: a vast world and a very small boy who thinks himself at its centre.
Critics and Ayoade himself acknowledged the influence of Wes Anderson on Submarine’s visual grammar. Anderson’s films are famous for their symmetrical framing, deadpan performance style and painstaking production design. Ayoade borrows these tools but applies them to a Welsh working-class coastal town rather than the fantastical environments Anderson typically constructs.
In the candlelit-dinner sequence with Jordana, the camera positions both characters equidistant from the frame’s centre, a candle between them. The warm amber light from the candles fills the lower half of the frame; the walls behind them are a deep, saturated red. The symmetry is conspicuous — almost theatrical — but that is precisely the point: Oliver is staging the evening rather than living it, and the camera’s conspicuous formalism mirrors his self-consciousness. This is mise-en-scène that comments on the character’s inner world rather than simply recording it.
Iris Transitions, Super-8 Inserts and Voice-Over
Ayoade employs a range of formally self-conscious devices that collectively signal the film’s self-reflexive aesthetic. Iris transitions bookend several sequences — a technique borrowed from silent cinema that underlines the film’s awareness of its own artifice. Super-8-style inserts, grainy and overexposed, punctuate the narrative as memory or fantasy fragments; they have a different texture from the main film stock, creating a dual register of “what is happening” and “how Oliver is remembering it.”
Oliver’s voice-over narration runs across the film, threading a literary, slightly pompous verbal register through the images. This combination — mannered prose narration over carefully composed images — anchors the film’s macro concern: adolescence as a performance the adolescent directs for himself. The narrator is unreliable not because he lies, but because he edits and aestheticises.
The bullying-of-Zoe playground scene: Ayoade frames the sequence with a shallow depth of field that keeps the background crowd softly out of focus, isolating Oliver and Jordana in sharp relief. As Oliver participates in the bullying to impress Jordana, the camera gradually tightens from a loose two-shot to a close-up of Oliver’s face — not a heroic close-up but an uncomfortable one, the lens too close, the character too aware of being watched. The sound design strips away ambient noise, leaving only the slap of the trampoline and diegetic crowd murmur, making Oliver’s complicity feel uncomfortably quiet and deliberate. Macro meaning: adolescent cruelty as self-presentation.
The cliff-side argument with the mother: In contrast to the candlelit-dinner’s warm symmetry, this sequence uses a colder, bleached-out palette — grey Swansea sky, pale stone, Oliver in dark clothing. The camera holds in a wide shot for much of the exchange, refusing the comfort of close-up reaction shots. The horizontal coastline in the background dwarfs both characters; the framing insists on the smallness of the drama despite its emotional weight. Macro meaning: family tension observed rather than dramatised, resisting sentiment.
The closing return-to-the-beach sequence: The film returns to the coastal geography of its opening, but the light is flatter and colder. Alex Turner’s guitar motif plays non-diegetically over a series of locked-off medium shots of Oliver standing at the water’s edge. The iris transition appears here for a final time, closing the frame down to black on Oliver’s face — a formal echo of the opening that signals narrative circularity. The macro reading is ambiguous: has Oliver changed, or simply returned to the same adolescent posture?
Three signature devices: (1) saturated 1980s-throwback colour palette — heightens adolescent subjectivity; (2) symmetrical framing and iris transitions, borrowed from silent cinema — signal self-conscious artifice; (3) Super-8 inserts and voice-over narration — mark the gap between event and its retelling.
Genre, Context and Typicality
Understanding Submarine’s aesthetic also means asking what is typical or atypical of its genre and industrial context. As a micro-budget British indie, the film was made without the resources of a mainstream production — no visual effects, limited locations, small crew. Yet Ayoade turns these constraints into a deliberate aesthetic signature: the precise compositions and controlled palette feel chosen rather than accidental. This is characteristic of the indie auteur mode where budget limitation is converted into stylistic idiosyncrasy.
Alex Turner’s original acoustic guitar-and-voice songs sit at emotional turning points in the narrative montages; they are not needle drops. They do not comment ironically on the action — they amplify it, giving the sequences a lyrical quality that reinforces Oliver’s romantic self-image. This musical strategy aligns Submarine with a tradition of British coming-of-age films that use pop music as emotional shorthand (compare to the Springsteen needle-drops in Blinded by the Light for a different deployment of the same technique).