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Red Road [2006]


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True Grit
Review date: 2008-05-09 Rating: 10 out of 10

A fantastic film that had myself and a group of friends guessing throughout and lots of food for thought afterwards. The quality of the acting was superb as was the pace. We had watched Sherrybaby the week before that attempted at raw emotion, this supersedes anything I've seen for a long time and makes the attempts coming out of Hollywood look rather limp and pathetic.

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Reviews


A manipulative and dishonest movie.
Review date: 2008-04-05 Rating: 4 out of 10

This is one of the most dishonest and manipulative movies I've seen in a long time, a surprise considering its Dogma associations. It is very well-made and is a remarkable achievement given its tight budget, and despite comments elsewhere, this isn't remotely boring - in fact quite gripping and engrossing. Nonetheless, the qualities it possesses are put to the service of an ultimately trite narrative.
Let's be quite clear: despite initial impressions, this film is nothing like Rear Window or The Conversation, where characters obsessively piece together snatches of seen or overheard experience. (Each of those films is serious and honest in a way that Red Road seems to aspire to be, but just isn't.) In Rear Window this process becomes analogous to the experience of watching movies - making sense of scraps of discrete but juxtaposed images. In Red Road, like Jefferies in Rear Window, the protagonist's point of view dominates, and quite often we see precisely what she sees, courtesy of surveillance cameras. Her obsessive interest in one of the faces (Clyde) that she sees, initially engaged in casual sex on derelict land, is bewildering and incredibly disturbing, as she places herself in increasingly precarious situations. It is repeatedly implied that the guy she is watching is a crook, or worse, a sex criminal/paedophile, and my heart was in my mouth as I wondered what on earth she was doing and feared that she was endangering herself in a really horrible way. But of course, she knows exactly who the guy is, has personal experience of him, and whilst he isn't someone I'd like to have round for tea, he clearly (once we know the full story, as Jackie does) isn't likely to sell her into slavery, eviscerate her, etc etc. Her knowledge of him is deeply unpleasant for her, but the unpleasantness is quite other than the film constantly suggests. In fact, Jackie is embarking on a complex revenge plot, not without its dangers and personal trauma because of how she and her family have suffered in consequence of Clyde's past behaviour, but they have little to do with the dangers the film so cleverly implies. For about 80 minutes, the audience is put through the ringer in ways which have nothing to do with the real risk Jackie is running, and the real nature of the unpleasantness of her connection with Clyde. Those 80 minutes completely falsify the truth of the potentially very interesting narrative.

After a deeply disturbing and explicit sex scene, the penny is allowed to drop (or is it a pocketful of loose change) and the story is clearly revealed as a revenge saga, which then becomes touched with the miracle of forgiveness and redemption in the last 5 minutes, accompanied by quite out of keeping saccharine music. All is revealed! And we can go home teased but cheerful that things have moved forward for Jackie and Clyde. (We have an earlier shot of Jackie looking in a shop window at an advert for a kid's party magician, and I certainly felt the magic wand hovering over the film at this point, except 'trickster' rather than 'magician' would be a more appropriate term!)

How someone deals with bereavement due to criminally dangerous driving is an interesting and challenging subject. How the urge for revenge could enable a woman to have the most intimate sex with a guy responsible for the deaths of child and husband would make for a really disturbing and difficult movie. How the desire for revenge can become transformed into a kind of understanding and forgiveness, even the degree of empathy that this film seeks to show, would make a very interesting film. But this film isn't it and its attempt to drag that in at the end is completely unconvincing and not remotely explored: in other words a mere narrative trick to tie the ends up. So as a thriller the film is dishonest, because the central character (and the film maker, of course) know so much more than we do that undermines the 'thriller element', and as a piece trying to say something about revenge and forgiveness it is glib and superficial to the point of actually being almost offensive, an offensiveness made even worse by its indie credentials really exploiting old Hollywood type manipulation. Interestingly, another much vaunted 'gritty', 'realistic' film of the last couple of years, 'London to Brighton', suffers from the same narrative glibness at the end that makes it very hard for me, if no one else, to remember the real virtues each possesses as they are buried under truly awful endings.

Slow burning movie
Review date: 2008-02-25 Rating: 10 out of 10

Forget the over hyped Shane Meadows and make way for Andrea Arnold. Red Road is a laconic, psyhilological thriller about a woman who works in CCTV surveillance whose eyes rest upon a man on a Glasgow street- we know that she knows him but we don't know why- and she gets steadily obsessed with him. She frantically tracks the man via CCTV and once she works out where he lives she sets out on a quest of revenge for a crime that was committed in the past.
This is the most atmospheric movie I have seen in a long time. It has some truly shocking scenes of sex and violence. Red Road is a qualified triumph, but a triumph nonetheless, and the best UK directing debut in ages.


True Glasgow Grit
Review date: 2008-01-21 Rating: 8 out of 10

Wow - once you've seen it; a film you can't stop thinking about. Jackie seems quite a hapless mundane character at first but then you discover the reason for her switching off from life. She undergoes the most dramatci catharsis and then finally there is light at the end of the tunnel. Brilliantly shot and clever use of the CCTV voyerism into people's lives. Martin Compston in his best role since Sweet Sixteen. Only criticism was of Clyde being a bit too well spoken for a real Glaswegian.

redemption! not revenge!
Review date: 2008-01-11 Rating: 10 out of 10

Kate Dickie is luminous in this film - every scene with her is just graced with her performance - she is so ordinary and extraordinary looking simultaneously. I completely did not expect this quality of acting in this film; Curran too is v. good but Dickie carries it. The suspense, in terms of not knowing the full backstory (as opposed to wondering what's going to happen), is conveyed well - characters appear that you want to weight with the most sinister backgrounds because of the unknown story at the heart of the film. I have rarely seen a film whose key sexual scene was so absolutely necessary to the plot, and I love that there was no background music. In a big US studio treatment, this film would've been full of violins and tears - its starkness only enriches its finale. Only criticism is dialogue when there's loud background noise - Glaswegian accent is strong but discernible, but not against background noise - takes concentration! Previous reviewer said this film was part of series of films agreed with L. von Triers in terms of rules of filming. Does anyone know what are these other films? Were any as good as this one, or as successful commercially?

Product Details/Specifications


Actor(s):
Natalie Press
Kate Dickie
Tony Curran
Martin Compston

Creators:
Kate Dickie (Primary Contributor)
Natalie Press (Primary Contributor)

Director(s):

Recording label: Verve Pictures
Manufacturer: Verve Pictures
EAN: 5055159277389
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: Anamorphic, PAL,
Release date: 2007-02-19
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Audience rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
Region code: 2
Running time: 110 minutes
Language: English (Original Language)

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