Review by Mike Martin
Stars Rachael Blake, Tom Butcher, Sonny Muslim,
Ashley Chin, Jumayn Hunter, Kieran Dooner,
Tom Kane, Jennie Jacques, Corinne Douglas
Written by Paul Andrew Williams
Certification UK 18
Runtime 77 minutes
Directed by Paul Andrew Williams
When director Paul Andrew Williams burst onto the scene with the brilliant London To Brighton in 2006 it looked like a great new British talent had arrived. His follow-up, The Cottage – actually written before London To Brighton – was a misfire but at least showed he was willing to try different styles and genres rather than merely rehash his debut film. This, his third film, is a thoroughly depressing experience, and not always for reasons Williams is trying for.
All of the things which made London To Brighton such a shocking experience are misused here. The violence, the goofy, incompetent gangsters, the trash talk and the innocent victims are all present and correct, but Williams has fumbled the ball and produced a film which really should have been a TV play, and not just because of its single room setting and very short running time – officially it’s 77 minutes, my watch registered less than 70 by the time the credits started.
A tired-looking middle-class couple are sitting down to a monosyllabic dinner in their pleasant suburban home when three thugs invade their space, beat them up and tape their hands and legs. They appear to be after money or drugs, but it slowly emerges they are there to take revenge on the couple’s son, Oscar, for shopping a drug-dealing relative to the police. Oscar is not home, so the three chavs wait, watch some TV and indulge in some casual rape and violence.
Williams’ film is clearly trying to say something about modern Britain – we are a nation of illiterate junkies or middle-class buffoons with nothing in between – but his dialogue is so stilted and the story is so clichéd it’s extremely hard to care. That’s partially because it’s been done so many times before – Funny Games, Adulthood, Harry Brown and The All Together are just four recent examples of the revenge thriller, all of them far more complex and interesting than this – apart from All Together which was just plain awful. For a film with a lot of violence it carries remarkably little threat, and the characters are sketches rather than rounded people.
One of the thugs, Asad (the excellent Ashley Chin) does get a chance for a piece of extended dialogue about his life and why he has ended up as he is, and it’s to the actor’s credit that this is by far the strongest section of the film. It also shows the film’s major problem though – a man talking for 10 minutes while sitting on a sofa smoking a spliff is not the most engaging piece of cinema you will ever see. The ending too is a cheap shot.
Two thirds into the film Williams throws in three totally extraneous characters as if admitting his story has hit a brick wall, and by the denouement it’s become simply tedious. That is absolutely no fault of the actors, who all give it their best, especially Chin, Jumayn Hunter as the lead thug and Rachael Blake as the victim mum Christine.
A thoroughly grim experience which gives no insight into modern Britain’s troubled yoof or how we can get out of this terrible mess. Williams can clearly do so much better – or was his debut a Donnie Darko-style fluke?
• Cherry Tree Lane screens at the Film4 FrightFest. Check out our full coverage of the festival