The Scouting Book for Boys is a disturbed coming of age movie set around a Norfolk seaside caravan park. David and Emily are best friends whose hard-drinking, promiscuous single parents both work on the resort, and the film opens with somewhat cheesy scenes of them larking it up. But gradually the film finds its way, as Emily runs off, triggering a missing person investigation, and the underlying desperation of the place bubbles to the surface. Although the pace is slow, not enough groundwork is laid for the subsequent twists (which we can't talk about, but are deeply black) to be quite believable. That said, one of the film’s real strengths is its creation of recognisable characters, like the security guard who may be nothing in the outside world but is a bigshot to the children and wasters of the caravan park, manipulative Emily, and insecure David, played by the impressive Thomas Turgoose, a Shane Meadows discovery. There's a strong sense of place at work here, of a self-contained world and how it shapes its inhabitants, although its arguable that shooting in a Super-8 style that’s so identified with the 1970s heyday of the British holiday camp creates confusion as to when the film is set. The visuals, though, are beautiful and lift the mood of what would otherwise have been an unremittingly bleak piece. The Scouting Book for Boys is uneven, occasionally immature and with dialogue that doesn’t alway ring true, but overall it’s a bold and honest dissection of what it’s like to be a teenager in this kind of outpost of society.