Mark Jenkin’s Bait is the most strikingly original British film in years. Visually breath-taking, and brimming with thematic subtext, the film is woven as articulately as a fisherman’s net.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 14, 2024

There’s a level of affectation to Bait’s presentation suggesting… whatever you want it to suggest, I guess. Either way, it’s a hurdle to overcome on the way to feeling involved in this strangely engrossing class-divide drama.

| Aug 9, 2023

...functions on a subliminal level.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 25, 2023

Jenkin's movie, with its odd filmmaking quirks and time-bending editing, is a triumph of intelligent, insightful cinema.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 16, 2020

Bait isn't for everyone. But, if you allow yourself to be sucked into its visual-vortex, chances are you will fall in love with this strangely beautiful film. It is unconventional cinema bordering on the realm of art.

| Jun 12, 2020

Audiences in need of an immersive storytelling experience at their local cinema this weekend will be extremely well-served by Bait.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 4, 2020

Trust me, you have never seen a film quite like Bait.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 20, 2020

Mark Jenkin's debut feature has rightly earned acclaim for its pictorial and cinematographic ingenuity, but the work engages dramatically and thematically too.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 9, 2020

Jenkin's stunning and memorable debut is one that pokes itself into the uncomfortable spaces between class and solidarity in modern British society.

| May 4, 2020

Bait is a fantastic movie, and will intoxicate anyone who loves the art and craft of film. The pacing stumbles a little towards the end, it's true, but I left the cinema enthralled and full of excitement about the medium.

| Apr 21, 2020

By timing the narrative as a loose thread that shifts gears, Jenkin bends the time dimension to showcase class struggle with an anti-realistic touch.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 20, 2020

Bait can be disorienting, disjointed, and deliberately alien in the moment. But its homespun imperfections do stay with you after it's all over.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 22, 2020

Bait is a tenacious, chillingly blunt, and unsentimental examination of a current topic that is getting out of control... An unmissable avant-garde gem is here folks!

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 20, 2020

The experimental nature of Jenkin's production means it might take a few scenes to really get hooked. Bait reels the audience in, however, by casting a uniquely strange line, capturing elements of old and new cinema.

| Feb 13, 2020

Mark Jenkin sets the story in a small Cornish fishing cove in a film filled with the grit and grain of the fishing industry and a real sense of the people who sustain it.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Feb 6, 2020

Bait is a flawless film.

| Oct 31, 2019

The most visually memorable film so far this year ... The aesthetics of the film inevitably consign it to the arthouse, but for the right viewer, this film will be fresh, vibrant, exciting and extremely memorable. It certainly was for me.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 4, 2019

It's a genuine modern masterpiece, which establishes Jenkin as one of the most arresting and intriguing British film-makers of his generation.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 1, 2019

Bait feels both timeless and timely, making for an invigorating watch.

| Sep 1, 2019

In one of the most extraordinary movie experiences of the year, this Cornish-set drama unfolds in scratchy monochrome and jumpy, jarring shots, mostly featuring weather-beaten fishermen, and lobster pots, and nets and boats.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 31, 2019