Review of Red Road

Red Road (2006)
7/10
Glasgow surveillance shocker...
4 March 2009
This taut, excellent Scottish movie is set in Glasgow - on mean streets and council schemes where graffiti abounds and life can be a struggle. Where men are hard and the Tennants Ale flows...and too many look gaunt, wasted and shallow faced.

The plot revolves around the central character who works in a CCTV surveillance studio. She appears quite lonely , and very ordinary but she has a tragic past as is revealed later. She recognises someone on camera - someone from her tragic past and seeks to engineer a meeting with him for reasons unknown but which become all too clear.

This is a low budget homespun movie but as someone who collects Scottish output I'm glad to have it. It's a novel idea. The film would have been an 18 cert. I would hope. I have never seen such graphic sex scenes in a mainstream movie. They are not always pleasant and there is a pervasive air of tawdry, cheap but urgent copulation threaded through the plot. Not for shrinking violets or the prim amongst us but I did catch myself wincing once or twice....that's wincing.

However, if you rise above the sleaze and sympathise with our heroine who is really a fine upstanding lass with a lust for healthy revenge this film is worth taking a walk on the cheap side.

Incidentally, although the scale of surveillance is perhaps a trifle overstated it's a grim indication of just how scrutinised we in Great Britain are becoming as a society.
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