Happy

In a skewed future world not so very different from our own, teenager Rosie attends a counselling group to discuss her problem. Like the others present, she is covered in old scars and recent bruises. Unlike the others, she is also famous. Rosie's problem, and the reason why she can't go out without being asked for autographs, is that she is the world's most notorious happy slapper.

Made by a group of young people who were given the theme of 'happy slapping' and told to make what they could of it, Happy is an ingenious and spirited look at the popular phenomenon of beating up strangers and capturing the event in video form on mobile phones. It is at its most interesting when taking an amoral stance; we don't need to get sentimental to appreciate the damage done to Rosie herself by her obsession. Excellent performances all round, especially from the charismatic lead, are quite enough to draw the viewer in. Sadly the film-makers seem to have felt obliged to add a rather heavy-handed moral which doesn't quite make sense for the characters involved, even if it has won their work praise from Gordon Brown and secured it a future being shown in schools. The result is a film which feels tacked-together, latterly losing the exuberance which makes its various flaws so easy to forgive.

Although it is well edited and more visually inventive than the average youth effort, Happy suffers from poor use of light, especially in the studio scenes, which at times makes it look as if it was show in someone's living room without any special equipment at all. In places the team make this work for them, contributing to a cheap and nasty atmosphere which suits the subject matter, but this doesn't work in the scenes which require a more sedate kind of authority. Everyone seems more at ease during the action scenes (usually a more common place for inexperienced directors to screw up). The dark humour in these scenes feels more genuine than the later, slightly stilted studio exchanges.

Happy isn't really a film to seek out, but it does showcase some impressive young talent, and it'll be interesting to see how that develops over the course of future projects.