Keswick Film Festival

Synopsis

Members' Choice

Hold on to the edge of your seat; tonight we are off for this Seasons's gritty crime drama. Her husband is dead and the police won't believe it was murder; her son has gone totally mute since he died; she is living in poverty in Belfast and her mother looks down on her plight as "the wrong life choices". What more can go wrong for Sarah Collins?

Well, it hasn't even started yet. When a loser drug dealer breaks in to her home and insists on hiding some drugs there, "just for five days", it might not have been too bad, but he has stolen them from a big-time drug lord...who wants them back...

"Sarah reacts against criminals, she's patronised, ignored, irritated and hit on by almost everyone – a supermarket security guard who takes her for a hooker, a social worker who assumes a broken window must be her fault, police more interested in a noise complaint than a killing, and her endlessly disappointed mother" - Kim Newman, Sight & Sound.

Sarah is forced to go from frightened, grief-stricken widow, put upon by an uncaring system, to protective parent, to gun-toting film noir blonde.

Some great acting holds the plot together - "Sarah Bolger makes a slightly implausible character arc completely convincing, graduating from panicky improvisation to grim determination [ably supported by] Edward Hogg, as the teeth-baring Mancunian crime boss prone to discoursing on the correct use of metaphor [who] confirms his standing as a sorely underused asset of the UK film industry" - Phil Hoad, Guardian