NIL BY MOUTH (78)

Directed by: Gary Oldman

Starring: Ray Winstone, Kathy Burke, Charlie Creed-Miles

The Pitch: Drugs, crime and abusive families in a rough South London neighbourhood.

Theo Sez: Not entirely what you might expect perhaps, at least if what you expect is the kitchen-sink brutalism of something like ONCE WERE WARRIORS : it's certainly brutal, but also expressionistic and visually otherworldly, and concerned with brutality only as an element in the milieu it describes - domestic violence isn't even its main focus, at least in terms of screen time. What's great about it isn't (just) how visceral it is, or how unsparingly honest (violence has consequences here - its victims stay banged up long after the audience has moved on), but also how protean : one minute you're thinking Ken Loach - the precise chronicling of a particular working-class culture (what they eat, where they go out, what kind of stand-up comics they like to listen to) - the next it's Cassavetes, with his extended raps and everybody talking at once, then a touch of rather fey poetry a la Terence Davies (songs as counterpoint, e.g.) then, in scenes like the long-suffering wife's final act of defiance, played against a weird sepia-yellow filter, it's as though a demented stylist like Guy Maddin has taken over. Above all there's the visuals, holding everything together and plunging us into a hypnotic netherworld - browns turned to grey, bottle-greens and yellows accentuated, everything fuzzy and grainy - turning the various excesses (which may well have seemed too unrelenting, done naturalistically) into the stuff of nightmare. Far from perfect - overlong for a start, and the Creed-Miles character remains rather shapeless (possibly because he's the closest thing to a stand-in for Oldman himself) ; still, scene for scene, among the year's most thrilling and ambitious films. I invariably scribble down notes while watching a film but I couldn't even move my hand here, let alone tear my eyes away even for a second ; it's that powerful.