An intense character study of loneliness and mourning, tucked into a CCTV-p.o.v. portrait of grimmer Glasgow, disguised as a white-knuckled surveillance-age thriller, Andrea Arnold’s film follows a camera operator for the Scottish city’s string of public eyes, charged with tracking potential–and reporting actual–crimes. Borrowing neatly from Rear Window and The Conversation alike, the film also escapes its influences, wears them lightly on its sleeve. And I’m going to be cagy about what else happens in the film–burying it under the “more” and a big SPOILER tag–because the film is often quite surprising. Don’t want to undercut those pleasures.
Even as I tout this film, though, I want to first rave about one of the extras, the director’s short (and apparently Academy-Award-winning) Wasp, which in 23(ish) minutes packs a helluva wallop. Following a young single mom, trailing her three girls and lugging her infant boy, from an opening fight to their cluttered project flat to a night out on the town, the film seems to be both brilliantly composed and edited and yet caught on the fly–there are scenes in a bar that seem impossibly real, as if she had to be in there just filming. Yet it’s a gorgeous picture of dilapidated people and places, and edited with a virtuoso control–precisely crafted. This is a classic. Red Road is simply really damn good. Continue reading Andrea Arnold’s Red Road