Red Road (2007)

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

This film doesn't work for me; as another reviewer noted it is implausible anyone (let alone a police officer) would try such an evil trick on someone.The film reeks of political correctness... "everything is all right if an impaired driver killed someone" I thought the man had done something far worse to the police woman.No everything isn't all right a police employee spying (CCTV)on the population tries to stage and pin a rape on the person who accidentally killed her husband and daughter while driving impaired. She evidently wants him behind bars for life.While horrible the car accident occurred 8 years previously. Time heals normal people. No this story doesn't work not at all. The film itself works as porno for the 5 minute sex scene.In my fantasy ending Jackie (Kate Dickie) herself spends 8 years in prison for this aborted frame up. No make that 16 years hers was a premeditated crime his accidental.

With Red Road, Andrea Arnold has followed in the footsteps of such masterpieces as The Conversation and Blow Out with her exploration of characters who live in a world of voyeurism. She doesn't quite reach the heights of those two films and as her narrative becomes more about the characters themselves it starts to become slightly less interesting, but the film still managed to make quite the impression on me. Her and the phenomenal Kate Dickie's study of this fragile, internally destroyed woman was very impressive and remarkably understated in their portrayal of her inner demons.I like that Arnold doesn't give us any answers right away and we're left in a state of mystery, having to trust that she'll bring things around and unveil the truth at some point. It was a strategy that definitely hooked me in and had me constantly guessing, but I found it to become less compelling the more the answers were revealed. Dickie's performance is heartbreaking and once again Arnold has created a fierce and determined female lead, who is set in her goals and won't let anyone stand in her way; I love seeing such a strong and layered female character.As much as I loved the character though, I have to admit that the most compelling moments in the film were those quiet ones where we just watched her watch the city. Arnold gave an excellent look into the world of someone whose job is to watch; as ours is during any film. I also have to give mention to the main sex scene, which is just...explosive, to say the least. As she did with her next film Fish Tank, Arnold has done something remarkably unique in film when it comes to sex and created a scene that is so many things at once; it's strangely erotic, majorly important for the characters and actually moves the plot forward. In a world with gratuitous nudity and sex for the sake of sex, Arnold has created two sex scenes in the last five years that break the mold and blew me away.

I suppose this might have been given more leeway, were it not for Cache that so perfectly mapped the same space just two years prior; still, there is tremendous power at the heart of this, about the mechanisms of the mind that generate narratives clouting a true world.Alternately, you have the option of watching this for the story of sinister revenge, expressed with the gritty realism of a hostile environment the British know so well. How much you'll get out of it in this way depends on what personal pain you can supply, your own fill of bottled-up hurt that will remain unspoken as you probe around with this woman in search for redemption.This is not the film's power for me though, its proper context is Blowup; there, it was an encounter with an inexplicable image that propelled a feverish effort of the mind to interpret, to attach a narrative around it, that gradually rendered the entire visible world a collection of inexplicable images. Cache masterfully updated this, by feeding from our position behind the camera the inexplicable image to the recipient, himself the source of that image, the facade, in ways that would align the search for that hidden camera filming the stage, a stage that was life, with a search for the true maker that generated the image.Both these were masterful stuff on the formation of illusions, some of the best I know, that everyone should experience at least once. This one unswathes from them.So once more we have a protagonist observing the world from an artificial eye, in fact many worlds at once, each one its own entry into life, it's a brilliant touch that we're given this from a CCTV control room because we're shown how she operates this world from the level of the gods, controlling by merely picking up a telephone, nevertheless it posits a fractured seeing that cannot embrace a unified whole; it is simply not the real thing, though the illusion is potent, cinematic.This is all well until she encounters among the flow of images one that she knows, that wound deeply in the past and is not meant to exist at this point, we can tell this much from her reaction. She is gradually obsessed with solving the mystery posed by this. Of course, being self-absorbed with this image that is her past, she loses focus of the real world that matters. People get hurt as a result of negligence, that she could have prevented by simply looking at the right place.The obsession consumes her so badly, that she literally emerges inside this baffling narrative, that presumably continues from where she left it, in an effort to apprehend the image from up close. Her involvement is carried out by acting a part, this is a clever touch, a part that promises promiscuous sex that grants her entry behind closed doors.But from up close, it is no longer an image. There is escalating danger of us being apprehended inside this seamy underbelly of Glasgow. We are not meant to be exploring what we are, the film works this into a razor-sharp tension that slowly simmers with cheap booze and violent outbursts.It is really powerful material up to this point, but which the filmmaker cannot properly align around the fact that it's an internal vision powering the whole, a pursuit from memory and desire. So we get a predictable denouement that reveals how all the different parts make sense, as though it was the whole point from the start. There is too much that is blunt that we are suddenly tasked to handle emotionally, itself jerking us from our own position as observers. Nonetheless, she preserves a fitting image for the redemptive aftermath; the woman is no longer observing from afar, from behind a screen, but walking down the road. Absolved from the painful processes of self-consciousness, seeing no longer fractured by the past, no longer framed, she can open up to the flow of life and be part of the whole again.

This film tries to create an aura of mystery and fails. It ends up being predictable and ultimately disappointing. It builds itself up for a major payoff that ends up not being anywhere near as shocking as you are lead to anticipate. Clyde turns out to be yet another typical Glaswegian anti-hero who committed a crime he didn't mean to and Jackie is just another person who hasn't gotten over the pain of loss and goes out of her way to manipulate her position, both at work and in her 'entrapment' of Clyde. The film captures the 'dreach' or bleakness of Glasgow well and it definitely captures the nature of technology and the certain voyeurism that results from it more often than not. But ultimately, it is a very goody-two-shoes ending. The best parts of the film are the acting, cinematography which has a Dogma 95 quality and the editing but again, the script is a let down. It could be a story that happens ANYWHERE and it fails to explain why necessarily Glasgow. All together, I found this film to be too hyped up to bother.