Red Road (2007)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

best movie i've ever seen.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Red Road (2006): Dir: Andrea Arnold / Cast: Katie Dickie, Tony Curran, Martin Compston, Nathalie Press, Paul Higgins: Intriguing drama thriller about occurrence as Katie Dickie oversees activity on Red Road through surveillance cameras. One particular guy named Clyde catches her attention when she realizes that he was in jail and now out free. This leads her to stalking and eventually becoming involved in his world. Director Andrea Arnold has fun with the surveillance theme but it contains very little music. That can strike against the film in terms of presenting mood. Arnold treats the material as a sort of movie within a movie as Dickie becomes engrossed within a lifestyle she only observes from the outskirts. Why she is stalking this individual is not quite clear, nor are we given much to go on in terms of her fascination. Dickie does well as this obsessed woman who leaves her comfort zone as a surveillance voyeur on the outskirts of paranoia. Tony Curran plays Clyde who is known for his relations with women and lives with another bickering young couple in his apartment. He is the object of her obsession but his lifestyle is hardly pure. There are two colourful supporting roles played by Martin Compston and Nathalie Press. While the film clearly could have been better, it is purely surveillance as we watch and wait for answers. Score: 8 / 10

This is a fairly simple film of a CCTV operator who notices a face from her past that she didn't want to see again. It follows Jackie as she infiltrates the life of the man from her past and tries to gain her revenge. It's a slow moving film and maybe it could have been cut down by 20 minutes but it does at least steadily improve towards to end. It boasts good performances from a strong cast which helps keep interest at the beginning. Red Road is not a particularly nice film to watch, the setting is grim and it's a darkly lit film which only adds to the general depressing nature of the film. There is nothing to lighten the mood and it also contains one of if not the most explicit sex scenes I've ever seen on film. However if you can get through the first hour then it does turn into a very effective drama. For a low budget film this is a very good effort and is worth at least one viewing.

With Red Road, Andrea Arnold has followed in the footsteps of such masterpieces as The Conversation and Blow Out with her exploration of characters who live in a world of voyeurism. She doesn't quite reach the heights of those two films and as her narrative becomes more about the characters themselves it starts to become slightly less interesting, but the film still managed to make quite the impression on me. Her and the phenomenal Kate Dickie's study of this fragile, internally destroyed woman was very impressive and remarkably understated in their portrayal of her inner demons.I like that Arnold doesn't give us any answers right away and we're left in a state of mystery, having to trust that she'll bring things around and unveil the truth at some point. It was a strategy that definitely hooked me in and had me constantly guessing, but I found it to become less compelling the more the answers were revealed. Dickie's performance is heartbreaking and once again Arnold has created a fierce and determined female lead, who is set in her goals and won't let anyone stand in her way; I love seeing such a strong and layered female character.As much as I loved the character though, I have to admit that the most compelling moments in the film were those quiet ones where we just watched her watch the city. Arnold gave an excellent look into the world of someone whose job is to watch; as ours is during any film. I also have to give mention to the main sex scene, which is just...explosive, to say the least. As she did with her next film Fish Tank, Arnold has done something remarkably unique in film when it comes to sex and created a scene that is so many things at once; it's strangely erotic, majorly important for the characters and actually moves the plot forward. In a world with gratuitous nudity and sex for the sake of sex, Arnold has created two sex scenes in the last five years that break the mold and blew me away.

What starts of as an fascinating mystery/thriller turns around and becomes more of a slow moving drama about grief, loss, revenge, moving on and forgiveness and it was a pretty good one at that but this film is definitely not for everyone. I thought the acting was pretty strong and believable and you felt her pain and struggle of the loss of her husband and her daughter and her odd way with dealing with it and it was just an intriguing but slow journey to find out what really happened that day to them and how she struggles to accept it and move on. This movie really had me guessing and thinking and surprised me in a couple of ways like thinking a certain character is more ruthless than they ended up being and how the mood changes towards the end and ends on a sad but positive note, believe me this is not a full blown thriller. There were some dark, erotic scenes in this film that is not for all tastes and might turn some viewers off so be warned. Overall this was not great but it was an interesting look at life, loss and kind of redemption and it was pretty satisfying, not really what I thought it would be at all but it's worth a look only once though. Don't expect too much from this film or you will be very disappointed, this one requires a lot of patience. More of a 2.5 out of 5 stars.