The lawless brutality of a young offender institution is the setting for this British movie written by Marching Powder’s Nick Love and directed by Ashley Walters. It’s a place where terrified newbies realise they can survive only by abandoning their innocence and decency, and submitting to the gang authority of a psycho top G, naturally involving a horrible loyalty test.
This is a place where drugs arrive by drone, where facially tattooed men meet each other’s gaze with a cool opaque challenge in the canteen, and where the cues and balls on the recreation area’s pool table have only one purpose: to give someone a three-month stay in the hospital wing while underpaid guards in lanyards and ill-fitting v-neck jumpers look the other way.
Tut Nyuot plays Troy, just arrived on remand for conspiracy to commit murder. Having been emotionally messed up by his neglectful, vulnerable mum Joy (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), he instantly forms a bond with Krystian (Vladyslav Baliuk), a shy Polish kid remanded for a chaotic attempt to burgle a library, in order to sniff the glue used to repair bindings. They are menaced by the chilling Dion (Sekou Diaby), whose rule they must obey; they are wary also of the sinister Mason (Ryan Dean). Stephen Graham plays Claypole, the unit’s caring youth worker.
This is a film that, for me, doesn’t quite have the storytelling ingenuity or plausibility of the comparable Bafta-nominated prison film Wasteman. Graham’s role is a bit earnest, and I frankly didn’t believe in how the cathartic final scene plays out, where he assembles the inmates to talk to them about shame. But that scene, and the film in general, have a bold idealistic belief in redeemability (which Wasteman doesn’t, really) and it challenges the genre’s hetero machismo.
Animol shows us the prison world’s three types of currency: phones, drugs and respect. The first two can be airlifted in by drone (those of my generation will smile to remember the quaint economy of “snout”, AKA cigarettes, in the 70s BBC comedy Porridge); the third is more intangible. Dion accumulates and maintains it through an unending, exhausting theatrical display of menace, which involves appointing consiglieres to hang out in his cell, who must be played off against each other as if in a Renaissance court. Mason has no talent for leadership; he is a loner who can only radiate violent spite.
But there is a fourth commodity: secrets. Knowing these, and threatening to reveal them, is a dangerous business; the irony is that blackmail will be a learning process – almost a coming-of-age process – for the inmates. This is a flawed film, certainly, but with empathy, and strong performances.
• Animol screened at the Berlin film festival.
