American Fiction|171 Turner Road, Scituate — The Beach House Standing In for the Vineyard

The house is the film's second lead. Monk Ellison comes back to it for a book festival and stays for a funeral, a diagnosis, a wedding and a brother's unravelling — everything Percival Everett's novel keeps inside one family. On the page and in Cord Jefferson's script that house sits on Martha's Vineyard, in the old Black summer colony around Oak Bluffs. American Fiction never went there. The budget said no. So the location team drove twenty-five miles down the South Shore instead and found Turner Road in Scituate.

Sand Hills is a sandbar of a neighbourhood: one line of shingled houses strung between Cedar Point and Egypt Beach, Atlantic on one flank, marsh on the other. The road is narrow enough that two cars have to negotiate. Winter storms throw cobbles over the seawall onto the tarmac and the town sends a loader to push them back. That ordinary weather is what the film borrows — the deck where Monk and Cliff needle each other, the kitchen window with grey water behind it, the constant sense that the sea is nearer than anyone in the family wants to say out loud.

Number 171 is a private home and nobody living there signed up for visitors. Stand on the public road. From the pavement you can hold the roofline and the horizon in one frame, which is exactly the composition the film keeps using. Then walk the length of the bar — every hundred metres the sound of the beach changes with its angle, and by the far end you understand why a production looking for the Vineyard settled for this and lost nothing.

Photo: coastal homes on the Massachusetts shore (Pexels, free licence) — illustrative of the Sand Hills shoreline, not the house itself.