The Dice Was Loaded From The Start

It's 2018. Max Anderson, toiling away on a new screenplay years after writing and directing his first and only film, is forty-two years old, just back in London after a decade in Berlin. His wife Karolina has landed a new job in the sustainability department of a big bank, and her relocation package includes an obscene rent allowance, so the couple and their two kids find themselves living on Pemberton Place, a once-shabby but now supremely desirable street in the north of the city. Aside from the Andersons, Pemberton Place is almost exclusively inhabited by a group of cultured, creative Baby Boomers, many of whom have lived there since its dog days in the 70s and 80s and think of themselves as the chief architects of its renewal. With Karolina tied up in endless Zoom calls that run late into the evening, Max spends more and more time with his new neighbours, particularly Bryony, an artist, and Jonathan, an investor with a background in film - the street's alpha couple - flirting with her, locking horns with him. Soon, though, Pemberton Place's cosy equilibrium is upended when eight politically mischievous Millennials move into an empty house on the street. Led by the earnest, ambitious Zoe, the new arrivals have the entitled Boomers in their sights, and the two generations quickly find themselves at loggerheads, with Max cast as go-between. As the Millennials steadily up the ante with increasingly antagonistic moves and the Boomers try to assert their authority, Max begins to see opportunities for himself in both camps: a possible path to financing his film in Jonathan, and a revitalizing sense of youth and rebellion in Zoe. As the clash builds to its climax in a carefully planned robbery, Max discovers that we all have to pick a side eventually. With wit, vivid dialogue, and a pace that feels both measured and propulsive at once, David Annand spins the battleground of the housing crisis into a brilliantly crafted study in intergenerational difference. The Dice Was Loaded from the Start asks: what does the good life look like? And how might we make meaning in an exhausted world?