Some of the tropes are familiar, but this brutally violent and gripping film sidesteps the cliches with committed acting and fierce storytelling punch
Rising stars David Jonsson and Tom Blyth bring A-game performances for this brutally violent, gripping British prison movie, as lethal and nasty as a sharpened toothbrush. Screenwriters Hunter Andrews and Eoin Doran and director Cal McMau are feature first-timers, creating a film that is a deserved Bafta nominee in the outstanding British debut category. Some of the tropes are familiar, but this film sidesteps the cliches with the committed acting and fierce storytelling punch.
The scene is an overcrowded jail (filmed in Shepton Mallet) whose ugly savagery and chaos we periodically see through the smartphone screen of someone gleefully filming it – the kind of jail which has forced the government’s policy of early prisoner release to take pressure off the system. Jonsson (from TV’s Industry) is Taylor, a shamblingly submissive and timid drug addict, who can hardly believe that this new arrangement means he is due for parole in a fortnight; he is pathetically excited at the thought of seeing his teenage son.
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