Image: www.canberrafilmfestival.com.au/
When Eric Love (Jack O’Connell, TV’s Skins) is first introduced to Starred Up’s viewers, his head is bowed, his expression is stern and grim, and the sounds of his setting – an otherwise empty transport van to prison – emit an inescapable, all-encompassing echo. He is escorted into the sparse facility, then stripped and searched, the physicality of the act clearly depicted and the toll taken on a young man forced into such harsh confines able to be extrapolated. Swiftly, Eric finds trouble amongst his fellow inmates, his bustling listlessness manifesting in violence and manipulation as the only outlets for his perpetual state of heightened agitation. His also-incarcerated father Neville (Ben Mendelsohn, The Place Beyond the Pines), an absent figure for much of his life, tries to place him on the right side of jail politics, while voluntary therapist Oliver (Rupert Friend, 5 Days of War) attempts to offer another form of catharsis through sharing and understanding.
Eric appears every inch an innocent, perhaps not in his deeds, but in his immediate fish-out-of-water status upon his arrival. Though brimming with bravado and accustomed to the routine of life inside, his transfer is a result of bureaucracy not maturity; reaching his 19th birthday he has been upgraded to serve the remainder of his time with adult offenders, the elevation referenced in the feature’s title. His positioning is purposeful, both in the direct manner in which director David McKenzie frames his face and form, and in the too-confident, compensating posture of O’Connell. First-time screenwriter Jonathan Asser’s imprisoned creation should be on a course for redemption, one the feature toys with and the audience expects from seemingly similar fare, yet the film never renders him with such crude laziness.
Instead, complexity reigns in telling a tough tale. Bars, wire and all other manner of limiting, separating materials constantly clutter the image, consigning Eric constantly behind barriers. Whether looking up at the inner workings of the world he inhabits, or peering down on his place within the menacing microcosm, cinematographer Michael McDonough (Lay the Favourite) misses no opportunity to overlay clear symbols of constraint over the character for much of the film’s duration. When Eric starts being seen sans criss-crossing patterns, that his visual freedom intersects with a potential upswing in his predicament is also by design. Again, however, Starred Up remains a film intent on disproving cliché, not adhering to it. Based on Asser’s own experiences counselling convicts, the terse, tense feature’s central point of focus may be laden with all the standard elements in narrative developments and thematic thrusts, but predictability and generic placation isn’t its ambit.
It takes a revelatory kind of performance to sell such an abrasive protagonist within these lean surroundings, one that needs an actor’s assurance and ambition akin to Tom Hardy’s work in Bronson. Certain rising star O’Connell turns in exactly that type of portrayal, making the ever-defiant, eternally swaggering Eric a target for acceptance of his nature, if not empathy for his plight, never a likeable creation but never a target for judgment, either. Against the equally excellent Mendelsohn and Friend, each exemplifying realistic examples of masculinity at opposite extremes as they tussle to exert their own forms of father-son-type influence, he steals every scene. There’s relentlessness in his enacting of a youth running on instincts at odds with sensibility, just as there’s the restlessness of rallying futilely against his circumstances, that gets to the heart of Eric’s lifelong unease and resulting tumble into psychopathy.
Painted in the usual palette of fearsome institutional colours and spliced together with probing precision, Starred Up is a bleak effort about a brutish character and bitter climate that never backs away from its bristling impact. Thankfully, McKenzie brings the inherent cruelty and conflict to the screen with sensitivity and subtlety not often a part of the prison subgenre. The helmer’s cinematic back catalogue has been varied, including the dark Young Adam, romantic Asylum, mysterious Hallam Foe, satirical Spread, ponderous Perfect Sense and upbeat You Instead, but with his latest feature he crafts his best effort yet. It is his restraint that resonates, the film and filmmaker jumping, no-holds barred, into a blood-spattered environment bubbling with angst, and always favouring the intimate and uncomfortable over the overt and obvious.
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Starred Up
Director: David Mackenzie
UK, 2013, 106 mins
Distributor: Madman
Rated: R
Canberra International Film Festival
October 23 – November 9
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