Red Road (2007)
July 10th, 2007
Directed by Andrea Arnold, starring Kate Dickie and Tony Curran.
No summer blockbuster, Red Road is a slow-building, paranoid, finally uplifting thriller about revenge and redemption. It takes place in a crummy area of Glasgow (and with Glaswegian accents: turn on the subtitles), where people live in 30-storey highrise housing projects, drink and fight too much, and chase after the easy score. They also care for their estranged children and their little dogs and hamsters and in some cases, they try to go straight (more or less) when they get out of prison.
Shot by the principles of Dogme cinema, it’s all hand-held cameras and grotty available light. The look of it is in keeping with the overriding theme of voyeurism as Jackie (Kate Dickie), the female protagonist, works as a monitor of the automated surveillance cameras that are found on every corner in modern Britain. Sitting godlike at her bank of screens, she chuckles at the antics of her subjects, follows her prey, and plots her revenge, all on video.
Dickie
Watching this film is an uneasy experience. You won’t know what’s going on most of the time, because the director only lets slip scraps of information when you need to have them. But once you have committed to it, you won’t want to miss anything.
The film includes an extended graphic sex scene that not everyone is going to like. Whether it’s erotic or not is a matter for debate, but it is absolutely crucial to the plot. It isn’t specially violent. Be warned.
Watching this movie was hard work. At first I found it slow and dreary, and it was hard to see a reason to stay with it, but I did. By the end I liked it a lot. I recommend it highly.
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