Trapped inside the endless labyrinth of doors, walls and floors, Niamh (Mary Woodvine) and her two children hide from the poisoned world outside where one cannot survive without wearing a respirator. Niamh keeps the maps of their black and white maze on paper scraps she sticks to the walls, and she follows their directions in the light of the unevenly flickering electric lamps, which, strangely enough are still working. People come and go inside this eerie world of shades and shadows, sometimes white and ghostly like apparitions, sometimes embodied and violent. They, apparently, leave disturbing messages for Niamh, so to keep out evil intruders she sets up traps, one of which kills Sean, whose body she now has to hide. But the worst is still to come - Niamh's children fall into a deep sleep and she cannot awaken them.

When Jackson (Mark Pearce) and Siobhan (Helen Rule) show up looking for Sean, Niamh denies ever seeing him, but demands to know how her intruders are able to walk outside without dying. While Jackson and Siobhan refuse to share their secret, Niamh reluctantly tolerates their presence and Jackson's advances. But, when she can no longer find her children anywhere in her maze, she realizes that something had gone terribly wrong... and she might be the cause. A powerful brain-teaser with a Fellini look and feel, The Lark throws you into what appears to be an aftermath of an ecological disaster where reality and delirium go hand in hand. And as you sink deeper into the dark unfamiliar world, your own mind can no longer tell illusion from reality.

When I first spoke to Paul Farmer, the producer, I expected to hear about a big budget, a script that took a couple of years to perfect and a psychology consultant that helped to make the story real. But Paul surprised me. "We had three weeks altogether to get into production," he said. "I wrote the script in a holiday chalet in Teignmouth, on the coast up in England, circulating drafts by stealing Wi-fi in the town square." The dark and stormy weather helped to maintain the atmosphere of the script, he added. "We scraped together money and eventually went into production with £10,000." Such rare precipitation was caused by the impeding demolition of the filming location - a huge abandoned structure that once was the prestigious headquarters of Holmans, a big engineering company in Camborne, Cornwall - so it was now or never. "We ditched all our previous work and brainstormed ideas stimulated by the Holmans building," Paul explained. "Apart from our creation of the ‘messages' and ‘maps', the building was exactly as it appears in the film."

Paul describes the Holmans as a mammoth structure with endless passageways, enormous staircases, and two very large spaces, one of which had once been a nightclub with a bar and a dance floor. Paul's crew divided large rooms into smaller spaces and partitioned off extra corridors, filming from multiple angles so a large location appeared infinite - to create "the corridors and spaces of Niamh's mind." Paul recalls that the building was a wreck. "It was cold, wet and dark... It was easy to create a hell in the camera when you were living in it sixteen hours a day... It was easy to believe the end of the world already happened."

One day exploring the building, Paul and crew found a new staircase on the top floor and discovered a whole new wing that looked like a little sanctuary which was where they placed Niamh and her children. When asked whether he ever pictured himself having to survive in a post-ecological disaster world, he gave an affirmative "Yep!" and added that the crew often stayed overnight. "Sometimes it felt like you couldn't get away. At night you could lose touch with the other people in the building and feel very much alone. We did end up living the film."

Mary Woodvine who played the part of Niamh, agrees that the old Holmans headquarters felt like another world, but also felt like a refuge, and helped her to feel in character. She says she felt raw and vulnerable during the moments when Niamh lost her friend Doc or desperately tried to save her children. "I loved playing the part... having the luxury to spend two weeks to really immerse oneself in a character is a rare opportunity." Mary adds that when they "opened the door at the end of the day it was easy to imagine that something terrible may have happened while we were cut off in our intense world."
Paul reveals that he very much wrote the script with Mary in mind as he was well aware of Mary's stage and screen work and could "go for the extremes" as he knew the part would be "played by an actor of the very highest caliber." Mary's both parents were actors; she went to drama school in Wales, worked extensively in television, acted in several shorts, made three feature low budget films and recently landed her first role in a major movie.

Just as his film, Paul managed to surprise me at the end when I asked whether his film was inspired by a true story. I was hoping for a negative answer, but he said the idea was indeed derived from true events. "I can't go into details without giving too much away," he said. "But the terrible truth is that this really happens." A native of Black Country, an industrial area of the English Midlands, Paul had worked in theatre, radio and film. His work in the arts is about communication, he says - the creation of a realm artists and audience can share to exchange insights into the larger world we actually live in. I'd say he definitely succeeded with The Lark.