A quietly excellent lead performance from Jessica Sula (a graduate of TV’s Skins) carries this raw, powerful movie from feature newcomer Rebecca Johnson – comparable to Girlhood. It is based on the notorious “Honeytrap” case from 2009, when a teenage girl in Brixton, south London, lured a lovestruck admirer into a brutal trap set by gang members. Johnson paints a picture of abuse, machismo and paranoia, mixing true-crime, urban-realist melodrama with a photolove nightmare.
Sula plays Layla, a 15-year-old who has just arrived in London to live with her mum after having been brought up in Trinidad. She is scared and lonely, but dimly aware of her beauty, and the power it might yet allow her to wield, and nurses a timid, poignant narcissism, gazing at her own reflection in the bedroom mirror. She is dazzled by a heartless wannabe rapper Troy (Lucien Laviscount) but also touched by the puppyish infatuation of another boy, Shaun (Ntonga Mwanza). Tragically weak and devious, Layla allows herself to be made a sex object, using Shaun to make the violent, abusive Troy jealous, with terrible results. Weirdly, the toxic emotional triangle reminded me of Mike Newell’s Dance With a Stranger, about the Ruth Ellis case, with Troy in the glamorous Rupert Everett role and Shaun as pathetic Ian Holm. Of course there’s a very different outcome. Honeytrap has urgency, power and punch.
