Red Road

The movie is beautifully shot but is so slow moving in the beginning that it might turn some viewers off. However, if you can bear with it, the last forty minutes are brilliant. The portrayal of a broken-hearted woman and her desperation for vengeance isn't of the stereotypical sort. Instead the audience is never really clued in to exactly what her motivations are, just that she has a reason. The twist and reveal are handled with deft emotion. The character of Clyde is an interesting one because you never really get a handle on him till the final moments of the film. It is the emotion of the film that makes the audience hold on until the very last moments, though the sex doesn't hurt either. Until it does, of course.

Lead actors were very convincing and natural, I'm guessing a few of the small parts were played by non actors which i love and thought it added even more authenticity, the inner city settings and photography were gritty and real, an area which had obviously been excluded in so many ways and that grim reality was truly captured by the film. Story kept me guessing all the way through which i like, i did think i had the plot figured out at one point but i was way off the mark. Loved the general pace of the story and the fact that the script was so honest and uncompromising. I also enjoyed the more general theme of our living in a society in which we are being watched constantly without our knowledge and the privacy questions that generates. Highly recommended.

This movie is a slow but engaging film about loss, guilt, and urban life in Scotland. I found it intriguing to watch the lives of lower class people in Scotland and its unglamorised portrayal of daily existence in high rise apartment blocks. Messy flats, shitty greasy spoon diners, laundromats, housing blocks with no frills, no trees, just like the real thing.

The surveillance camera cop was interesting in itself, but the story was almost a bit part player in this film. yes it was interesting and the way it was unveiled without giving away any details before you absolutely had to know them was well paced.

But the characters were the most interesting thing, This is bleak, modern, urban life, real and uncompromising. Not overly ugly, just raw and real, and interesting.

I saw the trailer of this a few weeks ago and some of the mysterious and bleak nature of the shorts clips prompted that little voice inside me, saying " you won't be comfortable with it, but see it." I wasn't and I did.

The plot unravels slowly with little hints as to its central theme dotted about sensitively. It has you asking the question, what has happened to Jackie? How does this figure Clyde she has recognised and recoiled from on the CCTV monitors at work impacted on her lonely and monochrome life ? The answers come quite slowly as she puts her head into the lion's jaws of proximity to this danger man. A bit like the pantomime responses I felt like saying, " No, don't go any closer,he's behind you; you'll be recognised.", failing to recognise myself that something in her wants exactly that. In fact she receives from him perversely, what no viewer might possibly expect, but then she has us asking, is this payback time ? I'm not telling you, see the film ! The unfinished business Jackie has with Clyde is what this film is about.

The raw,down-at-heel, desperate, littered, high rise and windy Glasgow streets and housing estates as the backdrop. Ordinary everyday people get on with their lives oblivious of the drama being enacted in Jackie's life and culminating in an protracted showdown. But this is not the end. No, for all the unresolved grief, anger, erotic fascination and damaged lives, there remains a hope born of the unlikely. The film leads you away from the possibility, but ultimately there is life after death in Red Road. No cheering music soundtrack intrudes to romanticise what cannot possibly yield to only to the mawkish. There is just silence, sounds of the street, machinery, public transport and some well chosen tracks to create mood when required. This is what the vintage among us identify as continental cinema, no wonder they loved it at Cannes. This is not a film for audiences to remain detached from; the sheer intimacy of the camera work and the evolving personal destinies involved get you involved too, uncomfortably. A home grown vignette of humanity wrestling with the s..t that regularly happens !

This film tries to create an aura of mystery and fails. It ends up being predictable and ultimately disappointing. It builds itself up for a major payoff that ends up not being anywhere near as shocking as you are lead to anticipate. Clyde turns out to be yet another typical Glaswegian anti-hero who committed a crime he didn't mean to and Jackie is just another person who hasn't gotten over the pain of loss and goes out of her way to manipulate her position, both at work and in her 'entrapment' of Clyde. The film captures the 'dreach' or bleakness of Glasgow well and it definitely captures the nature of technology and the certain voyeurism that results from it more often than not. But ultimately, it is a very goody-two-shoes ending. The best parts of the film are the acting, cinematography which has a Dogma 95 quality and the editing but again, the script is a let down. It could be a story that happens ANYWHERE and it fails to explain why necessarily Glasgow. All together, I found this film to be too hyped up to bother.