Tough, gritty, Scottish drama might be enough to put you some of you off but Red Road is definitely worth the trip. This Cannes Jury Prize-winning film is the first feature film from Andrea Arnold, Oscar-winning director of the short, Wasp. Arnold famously described receiving an Oscar as the dogs bollocks so we know were not in for a Scottish film in the heart-warming tradition of Local Hero. Yet while we get close up to Glasgow’s dark street life, the film leaves us with a sense of warmth and humanity.
Arnold creates a mood of claustrophobic paranoia as Jackie (Kate Dickie) goes about her business as a CCTV operator to safeguard residents in a run-down Glaswegian housing estate. She spots a figure from her past and obsessively stalks him at first by camera and then leaves the security of the CCTV suite to stalk him in person. Roles are reversed when the surveillance operator becomes the target. Through tight direction that cranks up the tension, this taut thriller delivers convincing performances from the cast particularly Dickies interpretation of emotional repression, and because it makes you keep guessing till the end there’s real audience engagement.
On a Scottish note, Red Road is an Advance Party film, a curious project that will see three directors in Scotland and Denmark take the same characters and each write and direct a film which has to be set in Scotland. And for those of you who attended the WFC special event night with director, Josh Appignanesi, look out for April (Nathalie Press), who played the young Eva in Josh’s Ex Memoria.
An extraordinarily mature and thoughtful film. Philip French, The Observer.
A tough and superbly intelligent surveillance thriller, with real and believable characters brought to life by very good actors. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian.
Arnold reminds us that the best thrillers don’t settle for taking the audience away from their everyday experience rather, they burrow inward and, by sheer power of cinematic observation, make it hard for us to look away lest we miss something – on a screen or off. One key late scene’s sexual frankness may ruffle some feathers. Rarely, however, has a director made such purposeful and immediate use of sex to deepen and complicate a fiction film, rather than simply jazzing it up. Michael Philips, Chicago Tribune.
