Unpopular Oliver Tate is a 15-year-old who is infatuated with classmate Jordana. When Jordana invites Oliver to meet secretly after school, she takes pictures of them kissing, hoping to make her ex-boyfriend jealous. He reacts by putting Oliver in a headlock and punching him at school whilst they are surrounded by other pupils. Jordana soon becomes his girlfriend and after a couple of weeks they have sex in his bedroom whilst his parents are out. At home, Oliver becomes concerned about his parents. His father, Lloyd, is depressed. New-age guru Graham, an ex-boyfriend of his mother, Jill, has moved in next door, and his flirtations rouse Oliver's suspicions. Oliver's relationship with Jordana grows, but he learns that her mother has a potentially fatal brain tumour. At an early Christmas dinner at Jordana's house, he witnesses her father break down. Unsettled, he decides that the Jordana he loves is at risk because the emotional events surrounding her will "make her gooey in the middle". He cuts off contact with her. Thinking that his mother and Graham are having an affair, Oliver attempts to repair his parents' relationship. While searching for his mother on the beach, he is stunned to see Jordana with another boy. Horrified, he heads home; but, on the way, he sees his mother with Graham and assumes the worst. Enraged, he breaks into Graham's house, gets drunk, and commits minor acts of vandalism. When Graham comes home, he finds Oliver but returns him home with minimal fuss. The next morning, Oliver awakes to see that both his parents aren't angry with him and are reconciling. Oliver remains distraught about losing Jordana; he is downhearted for weeks, until he sees her on the beach. Running towards her, he explains his actions and learns that Jordana has either broken up with her new boyfriend or never had one. Together, they walk several inches deep into the sea, smiling.
and X Factor contestant Lucie Jones were originally cast in the film but dropped out due to other commitments.
Music
Original songs were written and performed by Alex Turner, the frontman of Arctic Monkeys. The soundtrack charted at 35 in the UK Album Chart. The original score was composed by Andrew Hewitt, long-time collaborator of Ayoade, recorded at Air Studios with The Composers Ensemble orchestra.
Submarine received positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a score of 88% based on reviews from 154 critics, with an average score of 7.4/10. The website's critics consensus: "Funny, stylish, and ringing with adolescent truth, Submarine marks Richard Ayoade as a talent to watch." At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 76 based on 37 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Critic Roger Ebert gave the film 3/4 stars saying "Submarine isn't an insipid teen sex comedy. It flaunts some stylistic devices, such as titles and sections and self-aware narration, but it doesn't try too hard to be desperately clever. It's a self-confident work for the first-time director, Richard Ayoade, whose purpose I think is to capture that delicate moment in some adolescent lives when idealism and trust lead to tentative experiments. Because Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige are enormously likable in their roles, they win our sympathy and make us realize that too many movies about younger teenagers are filtered through the sensibility of more weathered minds."
