Keswick Film Festival

Synopsis

At last, the British gangster film which so many aspirants have been trying to bring to the big screen, hitherto with little success. Winner of both BIFA Raindance Award, and Jury Prize at the Raindance Film Festival 2009, Ben Wheatley's debut feature is the portrait of a Brighton-based family (middle-aged gangster Bill and wife, Maggie) who live in the council’s Down Terrace. 34 year old son Karl, just released from prison has been grassed up, so the “family business”, on the rocks anyway, has to be seriously attended to: a course of action which leads to absolute mayhem.

Seeking analogies, critics have paid such varied compliments as ‘Brighton Rock reworked in the style of The Royle Family’, ‘The Sopranos meet Mike Leigh’, ‘directing style comparable to Ken Loach or the Coen Brothers’, ‘workaday pub-crawler gravitas of a Ray Davies (Kinks) lyric’, ‘Harold Pinter purring in his grave’, but Wheatley’s originality and talent look likely to set him on the path of considerable individual success.