Red Road

The opening moments of Andrea Arnold's Red Road focus on Jackie (Kate Dickie) at her job as a security surveillance monitor. Her life outside her job feels rather empty. (She's distant from her family.) But during one of her shifts, she recognizes someone from her past.

That someone is Clyde (Tony Curran), an ex-convict. Jackie starts stalking him through both her job and in real life. It boils down to a confrontation of aggressive means. Very aggressive.

Many films in recent years have taken advantage of the surge of technology. Sometimes it's used for comedic means, other times romantic. But the smarter films use technology for horrifying purposes, and Red Road has the latter in spades.

What Arnold does with Red Road is she makes a film of this nature through a female perspective. Normally this type of film has male predators and the women are reduced to helpless victims but here, the tables have turned in a big way. (Who said women have to be sugar, spice and everything nice?)

All in all, Red Road is very effective though it does start to lose steam towards the end. (It also features a very convincing sex scene.) Thanks to the work from Arnold, Dickie and Curran, it's a film that focuses on the dark recesses of human behavior. You can never really tell what a person is like when you first met them.

My Rating: ****1/2