Andrea Arnold’s first feature is a tight, watchful thriller built on Kate Dickie’s face and Robbie Ryan’s camera, and for ninety minutes we could not look away. The reason it eventually gives for all that watching is weaker than the watching itself.
Andrea Arnold’s first feature is about a woman who watches, and it is nearly as good as its idea. Jackie (Kate Dickie) spends her nights in front of a wall of CCTV monitors covering a patch of Glasgow that includes the Red Road flats, and the film spends its first hour making us watch with her. Arnold wrote it with Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen credited alongside her, and what she has made is a close, tense thriller that holds its nerve for ninety minutes and loses some of it in the last twenty. We recommend it, with that caveat and one more about the certificate.
Dickie carries the film and does it mostly with her eyes. For long stretches she has no lines, only a face lit by monitors, and Arnold trusts her to tell us when something on the screens has changed. Jackie is kind to her regulars, zooming in to check on a man walking an old dog, smiling at a cleaner who dances with her mop, and then Clyde Henderson (Tony Curran) walks into frame and the kindness goes out of her. Dickie does not play grief or rage. She plays a woman who has decided something and will not say what, and when she leaves the control room to follow him on foot the film gets more frightening because we know less than she does.
Robbie Ryan shoots it close and handheld in the grey light Glasgow offers in winter, and he lets the monitor footage look like monitor footage: grainy, faintly green, Clyde’s face breaking into squares when Jackie zooms too far. The towers are photographed from the ground so they seem to lean over the street. Nicolas Chaudeurge cuts between the control room and the pavement so that we are often unsure whether we are seeing a thing happen or a recording of it, which is the point. Helen Scott gives Jackie a flat with nothing out of place and Clyde a mattress on the floor and a kettle. Carole Fraser keeps Jackie in a dark work fleece with her hair scraped back, and Glenn Gregory’s music is so sparse that most of what we hear is the city.
Curran is good enough that we understood why Jackie cannot stop looking at him and why she would rather not. His Clyde is loud, free with drink, quick to put a hand on a shoulder, and plainly capable of harm, and the film does not say which of those is the act. Martin Compston’s Stevie and Natalie Press’s April, the young couple he lodges with, are sketched in a few strokes but true ones; Press makes April’s chatter sound like someone trying to be liked. The night Jackie follows Clyde into a party in the flats had us properly tense. The camera stays on her back in a crowded hallway, nobody there knows who she is, and we found we were not breathing evenly, and were slightly cross with ourselves, because Arnold had done it with a corridor, a crowd and a woman who will not turn round.
What does not quite work is the answer. Arnold withholds Jackie’s reason for most of the running time, and when it arrives it comes in a scene of explanation, the kind of scene the film had until then been too careful to need. It is not a bad reason, and Dickie plays the telling as well as she plays the silence, but it is smaller than what we had been imagining, and the final stretch that follows is neater than anything before it. There is also an encounter in the second half that earns the 18 certificate on its own. We think it is honest and we think both actors are brave in it; we also know people who will not want it in the living room on a weeknight, and they should be told.
Arnold went on to make Fish Tank (2009), and that film’s restless girl and this film’s still woman are from the same hand: a camera that stays too close, a refusal to explain anyone until it has to. Red Road is the colder of the two and the more controlled. Watch it with the lights off. It runs 113 minutes and we did not look at the clock until the explanation arrived.
