If nothing else, theatre director Rufus Norris’s debut feature, adapted from Daniel Clay’s novel about the roots and results of family violence, provides a fine showcase of British acting talent.
We expect good work from Tim Roth, Cillian Murphy and Rory Kinnear, three of the more experienced players in the cast. But the performances of the offspring of the two warring suburban families are uniformly excellent, especially Eloise Lawrence as the teenager who witnesses a brutal beating of a mentally damaged young neighbour and slowly but surely finds her previously innocent world becoming seriously dangerous. She is roughed up outside school and falls foul of the general atmosphere of unhappiness and scarcely suppressed rage.
Norris’s direction suffers from never seeming to pursue a direct narrative line for more than a few moments, which often renders the plot more difficult to follow than it need be. However, his thesis that violence repeats itself ceaselessly and in the end affects even those who abjure it, comes over powerfully. He is talent to watch in the cinema as well as the theatre.
