CATRIONA PAUL at the Movies.

PADDY CONSIDINE was my reason for seeing this violent revenge story. Noble as a grieving father in In America opposite Samantha Morton; re-born as a criminal who’d found God in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Edinburgh festival hit, My Summer of Love. In Dead Man’s Shoes, he plays Richard, recently released from the army and determined to kill his younger brother’s tormentors.
  
Considine not only invested a performance but also his skills as a writer, working on the script alongside director Shane Meadows whose last film was the comic Once Upon a Time in the Midlands. Their combined effort has produced a dark, menacing horror which, contrary to many films in the genre, increases your sensitivity to violence.
  
The location is familiar – a grim, decaying village in the Midlands – but gone is the humour of earlier work. Instead, the characters we meet are thugs, playboys and petty criminals whose gang mentality has been forged through a shared childhood and, more recently, through drugs.
  
Into their depraved world wanders Anthony, a teenager with learning difficulties. In a series of flashbacks, we see how he is tormented: force-fed acid, bullied into sex, beaten. Now Anthony’s brother, Richard, is back to seek vengeance.
  
Considine is focussed, capable, totally at ease with his mission. He brings authority and goodness which you cling to amongst the filth. Tony Kebbell plays Anthony with a meekness and innocence that turns your insides out when you see him abused. Gary Stretch is Sonny, leader of the gang, with a malevolence that leaves you reeling.
  
The start of the film artfully tricks you into seeing the gang as pitiful and absurd with naturalistic dialogue, half-familiar scenarios, the landscape usual. Part-time dealers who get smashed on their own gear, surrounded by squalor, it’s all about the lads. That this state can trip over into sadism when offered a vulnerable target is only too believable and wretched.
  
This is a powerful film. Know what you’re going to see and don’t expect to feel normal until quite some time after.
  
DEAD MAN’S SHOES
Selected cinemas.

Director: Shane Meadows
Scriptwriters: Paddy Considine, Shane Meadows
Cast: Paddy Considine, Gary Stretch, Toby Kebell, Jo Hartley, Seamus O’Neill, Stuart Wolfenden, Paul Sadot, Paul Hurstfield, Emily Aston, George Newton.
Certificate: 18
Running Time: 86 mins
Country: UK
Year: 2004

© Catriona Paul, 2004