“Red Road” starts out as an exercise in art-film alienation that’s too tricked up for its own good. But it eventually shifts into a fascinating, if quite alarming, study of extreme behavior, with a good measure of suspense and even the possibility of some hard-won redemption woven in.
The first feature by Andrea Arnold, an English filmmaker who won an Academy Award for her short “Wasp,” “Red Road” is set in all the uglier parts of Glasgow, Scotland. Its characters’ burrs are so thick that subtitles are required.
To make matters even more self-consciously arty, this is the first of three proposed films that will use the same actors playing the same roles, written and directed independently of one another by different filmmakers. It’s something called the Advance Party Concept, and it was dreamed up by some of the same Danes (Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen) who were involved with the severe Dogme film movement.
And there’s the so-cinematic-it- hurts basic concept that more or less dominates the first half of “Red Road.” Jackie (Kate Dickie, a television actress in a remarkably brave and demanding film debut) is a closed-circuit-television monitor for the Glasgow police.
She stares at banks of low-def video screens for hours on end, mainly looking for people who need help and crimes being committed but also, y’know, playing the part of Big Sister snoop.
Jackie lives alone and moves around in a numbed-out state. Early indications are that this is the result of the excessive voyeurism that’s part of her job, but we gradually realize that she’s suffered a great personal tragedy. One night she spots a man on a screen, Clyde (Tony Curran), who was involved in that trauma. Jackie hunts him down to the awful, high-rise housing project of the film’s title and, tremulously but with unwavering determination, insinuates herself into Clyde’s life.
And that’s when the movie really gets engrossing. Scary and utterly original, too.
Jackie’s motives make sense in the end, but her character is so shrewdly revealed that you spend most of the movie wondering, What is she thinking? Curran gets Clyde’s bona fides as a working- class monster across swiftly and succinctly, then builds a little humanity into the beast. Martin Compston, who starred in another great Scottish lowlife study, “Sweet Sixteen,” and Natalie Press (“My Summer of Love”) are equally compelling as a young couple who live with Clyde.
Though Jackie uses the CCTV system throughout “Red Road,” at a certain point that becomes blessedly secondary to the central, psychosexually charged drama. She could have run across Clyde in any number of ways that didn’t require surveillance equipment, after all, and Arnold knows when to shift her efforts to old-fashioned shoe-leather stalking.
That said, “Red Road” is a far more honest and intelligent descendent of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” than Hollywood’s recent pass at the subject, “Disturbia,” was ever meant to be.
So smart, in fact, that while the Scottish film raises the specter of how easily technology like this can compromise and abuse people’s rights, it also acknowledges that some lives can be helped along by what someone else sees in an intrusive fuzzy video image. Somehow, I think Hitchcock would have appreciated the disturbing irony of that.
—————————————-
“Red Road”
R for graphic sex, nudity, language, violence and substance abuse|1 hour, 53 minutes|SUSPENSE|Directed by Andrea Arnold. Starring Kate Dickie, Tony Curran, Martin Compston, Natalie Press|Opens today at Starz FilmCenter.
