With the relentlessly bleak Catch Me Daddy director Daniel Wolfe and brother screenwriter Matthew announce themselves as major talents.
Seventeen-year-old Laila (newcomer Ahmed) is on the run from her strict Pakistani family and has shacked up with unemployed white teen Aaron (McCarron, Neds) in an unnamed trailer park somewhere in West Yorkshire. Urged by his father, Laila’s brother (Ali Ahmed) rounds up some friends and two white hard cases - Gary (Lewis) and Barry (Nunney) - to knock on a few doors. But this is no simple runaway story: if Laila is returned home, she will face an honour killing…
Based in a setting that Andrea Arnold would feel at home in - in fact her regular cinematographer, Irishman Robbie Ryan, is behind the camera - the Wolfes ensure that this location, that grim estate feel of Tyrannosaur and Neds, becomes a character in its own right. This is a world of grey skies over greyer council flats, of rotted teeth and tracksuits and jail tatts, of gaunt faces puling on crooked joints, of afternoons sat on the front doorstep. It’s a world that has no ambition, no hope - the best one can hope for is a moment with one’s drug of choice at the end of the day. Grim.
We don’t know anything about these characters because we don’t need to: the clothes and the streets do that for us. That and how casually they go about acquiring a gun and cutting up tarpaulin to line the back of the car: a bloody body will be deposited in there at some later stage, but this is just another day and another job. Grim.
And the eye-catching performances, a mixture of established players and amateurs, spring from this; Gary Lewis (Gangs of New York) might be the only recognisable face here but everyone is strong. The Wolfes resist the temptation to allow the dialogue to descend into backstories and ambitions but they do dot the characters with little touches to fill in the blanks. Barry Nunney’s headcase urinates on his hand before he shakes hands with the Asians. Gary Lewis might be the quiet one but he’s driven solely by his addiction to cocaine.
But it’s not just the locale or the performances that seer themselves onto the eyes, it’s the Wolfes' deft storytelling. They almost do things in reverse: presenting the pay off before the plant. If there is a bum note it’s in its unblinking dingy outlook on life - there are one or two chuckles to lighten the load but the bleakness here is inescapable.
Stirring stuff nonetheless.
