This impressively vicious thriller directed by Dominic Brunt (who played Paddy Kirk in Emmerdale for years) looks at first like straight-up exploitation nonsense with its opening shots of a bra-clad Joanne Mitchell covered in blood screaming in a bathroom as Victoria Smurfit (also gore-smeared and in her undies) climbs the stairs with a knife. But as the narrative rolls back to show how we got to this place, Bait reveals itself to be smarter and subtler than the usual genre workout. The two women, it turns out, are best friends who run a cake stall in a market and get suckered into making a deal with Jonathan Slinger’s exquisitely evil loan shark. You know he has to be vile early on when he mentions he used to be an estate agent. Joking aside, what’s especially laudable is the dimensionality writer Paul Roundell distributes among the characters and the convincing way it shows how violence and fear ultimately distort the morality of even essentially good people. There are tacky touches here and there, but it’s basically a watcher.
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