Writer-director Duane Hopkins established his sober, contemplative brand of British social realism in his 2008 drama Better Things, and consolidates it here in a drama about a young man squeezed viciously by the poverty trap. Hopkins slightly overplays his hand by having ill fortune rain relentlessly on his hero Tim – brother in trouble, errant kid sister, thugs, bailiffs and a very ominous rash. But the zappy pace of the editing makes for an intriguing contrast with Hopkins’s and cameraman David Procter’s fascination with fleeting glimpses of poetic detail – textures of fabric and rough skin, trickles of light in murky nightscapes. The hard-bitten terseness doesn’t stop a faint glimmer of sentiment leaking in, but Hopkins is a stylist and a social observer with a cogent personal signature. And the ever-watchable George Mackay is on compelling form as a vulnerable but tenacious young man being slowly eroded down to his nerve ends.
